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1^73 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

9-1 f.:, ^^ 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

AND 

OTHER PAPERS 



OF THIS BOOK ONE HUNDRED 
AND FIFTY COPIES ARE PRINTED 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

AND 
OTHER PAPERS 



BY 



ADRIAN HOFFMAN JOLINE 



ice 



PRIVATELY PRINTED 

AT THE LITERARY COLLECTOR PRESS 
GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT 
1904 



vv:, 












Copyright, 1904, by 
Adrian Hoffman Joline 






CONTENTS 



THE BOOK-COLLECTOR 7 

Reprinted, by permission, from the Third Year- 
Book of the Bibliophile Society of Boston. 
Copyrighted by the Society. 

CONCERNING A CERTAIN AFFECTATION OF 

THE GREAT 37 

Reprinted from the Literary Collector, August, 
1903. 

REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 49 

Revised ; from the Independent, November 20, 
1902. 

RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 67 

Address before the Maryland State Bar Asso- 
ciation, July 26, 1902. 

WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 123 

Reprinted from the Literary Collector, May- 
June, 1904. 

OF THE OLD FASHION 173 

AN AMERICAN ABROAD 199 



PREFATORY NOTE. 

THE improper conduct of proper names in 
print is proverbial. Mrs. Keeley mas- 
querades under her husband^s name on page 
139. The late T. Bailey Myers attempts to 
conceal himself on page 60. The Honorable 
Mrs. Norton assumes, on page 130, a title 
which does not belong to her. These perversi- 
ties successfully eluded author, printer and 
proof-reader, each of whom insists that he 
is responsible. 

Ltickily the newspaper critics, like most 
other people, pay very little attention to 
privately printed books. I thank my two 
English friends who so kindly pointed out 
two of these blunders just in time to enable 
me to offer this apology. 

I find that Mr. W. E. A. Axon has expanded 
his sketch of Ainsworth into a short 
"Memoir" of forty-three pages, published by 



Gibbings and Company, London, 1902, and I 
am indebted to Mr. Ernest Dressel North for 
a copy. 

The papers included in this book have 
been gathered together merely for those 
friends who may care enough for them to 
give the volume a place on the shelves of their 
libraries, and not because there is anything 
in them which is worthy of preservation. 

Bernardsyille, New Jersey, 
July 16, 1904. 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

IT MAY seem prestimptuotis for any one 
-who is a mere bibliophile to attempt to 
treat of collecting and of the collector even in 
a brief and desultory fashion ; yet perhaps he 
may be better qualified to deal with the fas- 
cinating subject than one who is himself a 
member of the inner brotherhood. We know, 
of course, that a man may be an ardent 
bibliophile and even a bibliolater without 
deserving the dignified name of collector, 
although it must be confessed that bibho- 
phihsm and bibliolatry lead to collecting 
almost as surely as all those things abhorred 
by my ancient Professor of Moral Philosophy 
used to ** lead to Pantheism ; " but bibHophil- 
ism and collecting are by no means synony- 
mous. The list of members of the Bibliophile 
Society contains, if I am not mistaken, the 

7 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

names of many who make no pretensions to 
the rank of collector. Possibly it is because 
of their modesty, for all book-lovers and 
nearly all lawyers are afflicted with that 
over-estimated virtue. As I venture to enroll 
myself in both of these divisions of mankind, 
it will readily be perceived that as far as 
modesty is concerned, I am worthy of what our 
English cousins call '*a double first-class." 

In a volume lately published, the title of 
which my shrinking diffidence does not per- 
mit me to mention, I remarked with much 
apparent profundity that the appellation of 
''collector" carries with it "the suggestion 
of a wise and discriminating man v^^ho 
gathers the old and the rare, who selects 
only the best examples, and who knows pre- 
cisely what he v^ants." There is only a 
modicum of truth in that rather dogmatic 
assertion, because a genuine collector, a 
choice specimen of the charming genus ^ is 
often unwise and undiscriminating, gathering 
not only the old and the rare but the new and 
the common, all the more lovable for his insa- 
tiate thirst for books, and wanting "every- 
thing in sight," if one may be allowed to 
indulge in that condensed expression of 
thought which the narrow purist calls slang, 
but which broader minded men employ when 

8 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

they wish to drive an idea home to a reader 
or to a listener. 

But whether the collector be fastidious in 
his taste and dainty in his appetite, or greedy, 
gormandizing, omnivorous and cormorant- 
ish, he is an object of interest for he arouses in 
some observers a feeling of envy and of ad- 
miration, mingled with a slight infusion of 
awe, and in others who are unfortunately 
lacking in that catholicity of spirit which the 
judicious commonly possess, an emotion of 
pity, an indulgent tenderness, a sort of kindly 
commiseration. Not long ago I S3iw a line of 
Carlyle's written to some youthful gleaner 
of autographs, sneeringly characterizing that 
pursuit as a "poor" one, a judgment in 
which many vrill heartily concur, more's the 
pity, and many, but not so many, have a like 
estimation of the hobby of collecting books. 
A new^spaper revie^ver, that most airy and 
affectedly omniscient of creatures, recently 
said of a writer of books about books, that 
"he does seem to be more interested in books 
than in life, which is a bad thing." It was a 
fatuous remark, and if he had been consider- 
ing a treatise on geometry he might with 
equal propriety have said that the author 
was less interested in life than in mathemat- 
ics. It is, however, an illustration of the 

9 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

attitude which persons of limited intelligence 
are apt to assume towards those who rejoice 
in books and w^ho love to bring together in 
fond companionship the bestof them, creating 
what Carlyle called the true university of 
these days — a collection of books. One 
might well long for Elia's candle to examine 
the bumps of an individual who intimates 
that an interest in life and an interest in books 
are incompatible. His dullness of wit is to be 
compared only with that of an innocent per- 
son who in observing a portrait of Charles 
Lamb prefixed to a book of mine, asked the 
friend who had thoughtlessly thrust it upon 
him, if that was the name under which I 
usually wrote! Wordsworth tells us that 
"books, we know, are a substantial world, 
both pure and good," and that 

Round these with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
Our pastime and our happiness will grow. 

It may be that a few of the famous collectors 
lost in their bibliophilic zeal an interest in 
what is called life, a concern for their fellow- 
beings, a desire to leave the world better for 
their living in it, but as an amiable biblio- 
phile has well said — "In these busy days 
most bibliophiles and book-collectors are men 
of afiairs." In my own small circle of ac- 
quaintances I know men who are kings in the 

10 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

world of finance, men who belong among 
the great builders and constructors, men who 
are leaders in their professions, who at the 
same time are among the most enthusiastic in 
their fondness for their books. What of life 
could that poor scribbler have seen or known 
which had not been comprehended by these 
men of stalwart intellect, of broad culture, 
who find in their beloved libraries that relief 
from the strain of great responsibilities which 
enables them to perform their tasks success- 
fully and gives them strength for the daily 
conflicts in the world of business, the battles 
of the courts, the strife of human endeavor. 

As a rule, a long-lived and contented race 
are these accumulators of books and ancient 
manuscripts. There was the Right Honour- 
able Thomas Grenville, statesman and col- 
lector, whose fame still dwells with us, who 
died at ninety-one, leaving to the British 
Museum a library of over twenty thousand 
volumes which had cost him more than 
£54,000. Famzzi said of it that except the 
library of George III. the Museum had never 
received so important an accession. When 
we recall that there v^ere among the vellum 
copies a Mazarine Bible of 1454, an Aldine 
Dante of 1502, and a marvelous Vitruvius of 
Giunta dated in 1503 — but the catalogue 

11 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

would rival that of the ships in the Iliad — 
we may imagine the rest. Grenville used to 
boast that when he was in the Coldstream 
Guards and under twrenty-five, for he entered 
Parliament at that age in 1780, he "bid at a 
sale against a whole bench of Bishops" for 
some rare Bible. It is delightful to think of 
nearly seventy years of collecting, especially 
when we remember that during much of the 
time he had abundant leisure, being splendidly 
paid by the State for doing nothing of much 
account — which was the reason assigned by 
this man, who surely deserved the title of 
"Right Honourable," for giving his books to 
the nation instead of bestowing them upon 
his great-nephew, the Duke of Buckingham. 
It is no discredit that he held a sinecure in 
that century. 

Another collector who attained a patri- 
archal age w^as the gorgeous William Beck- 
ford, who came into a fortune of £100,000 a 
year and who spent right royally not only his 
income but his principal during his eighty-five 
years. Not a small part of it was lavished 
upon a library which as lately as 1882-1883 
came to the ultimate fate of libraries, the 
auction room, under the auspices of those 
princes of the book-selling realm, Sotheby, 
Wilkinson, and Hodge, who still continue to 

12 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

be the greatest book-auctioneers in the world. 
It was just a century after the time when, if 
tradition does not mislead us, Beckford wrote 
Vathek in a single sitting of three days and 
two nights. I w^onder if anybody reads 
Vathek in these twentieth century times. I 
own that I never read it myself, but we have 
read about it so often that ^^t feel almost as 
intimate with it as we do with Pilgrim.^ s Pro- 
gress, which is but an honored name in this 
generation. Possibly I am incautious in 
making that daring assertion, because a 
dozen men may cry out that they have read 
every v^ord of Bunyan's immortal religious 
romance; but there are eighty milhons of 
people in the United States of America, ex- 
clusive of the inhabitants of Porto Rico, of 
the Philippines, and of the Sandwich Islands, 
and Indians not taxed. 

So preservative of health is the pastime of 
book-collecting — or, if the solemn person pre- 
fers it, the profession of book-collecting — that 
almost to the day of his death, Beckford seem- 
ed to be strong and vigorous, showing few- 
signs of advancing years. His son-in-law, 
Alexander, tenth Duke of Hamilton, reached 
the same great age, dying in 1852 at eighty- 
five. The librar)^ of Beckford v^as added to the 
Duke's own. He was rich in manuscripts and 

13 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

most of them went to the Royal Museum and 
the Royal Library in Berlin, at a price said to 
have been over £75,000. Among them was the 
celebrated Go7cfei2 Gospe/s inscribed in gold let- 
ters on purple vellum, at one time the property 
of Henry VIII., and also the Divina Commedia 
of Dante, with illustrations attributed to 
Sandro BotticeUi, valued at £5,000. Such 
treasures are the despair of our poor, modem 
millionaires, who are said to pay enormous 
sums for books of far less rarity and distinc- 
tion. The humble owners of a few precious 
volumes think with awe of the £397,562 
which was realized on the sale of the Beck- 
ford-Hamilton library. Such reflections bring 
to our saddened minds the words of that de- 
lightful preserver of all good things about 
books, Andrew Lang, who sings of 

The Books I cannot buy, 

Their phantoms round me waltz and wheel, 
They pass before the dreaming eye, 

Ere sleep the dreaming eye can seal. 

Grolier had come to his eighty-sixth year 
when he died among his books, at his Hotel 
de Lyon; and Antonio Magliabecchi, who 
read every catalogue and knew the actual 
situs of almost every book of importance in 
his day, passed out of life in his eighty-second 
year, "dirty, ragged and happy as a king" 

14 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

according to the Eltons. It was of Maglia- 
becchi that the familiar tale is told about his 
answer to the Grand Duke's inquiry concern- 
ing a certain work: — **The only copy is at 
Constantinople in the Sultan's library, the 
seventh volume in the second book-case on 
the right as you go in." Thomas Caldecott, 
John Bellingham Inglis, and John Wingfield 
Larking at ninety, Sir Christopher Wren at 
ninety-one, Samuel Rogers at ninety -two, and 
John Payne ColHer at ninety-four are only a 
few additional examples of the well-known 
truth that the collecting of books is the pre- 
servative of life as the printing of them is the 
**art preservative of all arts." Study the 
record of ''English Book Collectors" as 
written down by Mr. Fletcher, and you will 
be forced to admit that the old-fashioned 
collectors were hopelessly addicted to the 
habit of octogenarianism. It may not be 
worth our ^vrhile to search into the reasons 
why, but we may conjecture that the placid 
and peaceful retirement of the book-lover 
may be more conducive to long life than the 
contests and struggles of the world — with 
their strain upon the vital force and their 
concomitant waste and dissipation. The con- 
tentment of noble minds is not an insignificant 
factor in the prolonging of human existence. 

15 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

They are generous too, these lovers of books. 
There was Nicolas Fabry de Peiresc, whose 
books ''came rolling in on every side"; 
who alwaj^s had at least one binder in his 
house ; and who, despite his profuse purchases, 
left only a small collection because he lent so 
much and gave away so many. The great Jean 
Grolierwas generous in his gifts, and the book- 
man will recall the inscription * *et Amicorum^' ' 
generally stamped on his books immediately 
after his name, to show that they belonged to 
his friends as well as to himself, although some 
students have reached the conclusion, by a 
course of reasoning vt^hich I am unable to fol- 
low, that he^vas merely indicating the posses- 
sion of duplicates. Richard Heber, the most 
liberal in his loaning of volumes from his im- 
mense assemblage, aroused the enthusiasm of 
Dibdin — which, perhaps, was not a difficult 
task — and his willingness to share his treas- 
ures with others evoked from the pedantic Doc- 
tor a glowing tribute. * * This, ' ' says Dibdin in 
his Bibliomania, referring to the liberality of 
Heber, "is the pars melior of every book col- 
lector and it is indeed the better part with 
Atticus. The learned and curious, w^hether rich 
or poor, have always free access to his library. 

The volumes, open as his heart, 
Delight, amusement, science, art, 
To every eje and ear impart." 

16 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

The learned author's verse is not of the 
highest order of poesy, but his intentions were 
excellent. When Sir Walter Scott dedicated 
to Heber the sixth canto of Marraion, he made 
an allusion to Heber' s generosity in the lines : 

Hoards not like theirs whose volumes rest 
Like treasures in the Franch'mont chest, 
While gripple owners still refuse 
To others what they cannot use. 

The Parisian book-stall men of the Rive 
Gauche — ^who can ever forget the charm of a 
ramble among their pleasant shelves, spread 
out along the quais? — are not likely to forget 
the kindness of spirit which prompted Xavier 
Marmier to leave a thousand francs to be ex- 
pended '*by these good and honest dealers, 
who number fifty or thereabouts, in paying 
for a jolly dinner and in spending an hour in 
conviviality and in thinking of me. " * ' This, ' ' 
adds the amiable Marmier, ''will be my ac- 
kno\\rledgment for the many hours I have 
lived intellectually in my almost daily -walks 
on the quays between the Pont Royal and the 
Pont Saint-Michel." It is in this way, says 
M. Uzanne, that memories are kept green. 
The book-stall men are considerate indeed, as 
I can testify. I bought from one of them 
an ancient copy of Voltaire's Henriade, con- 
taining a fascinating plate, for a few centimes. 

17 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

It was unbound and shabby, but it was 
curious and would have brought at least 
twenty times the amount if it had been sold 
in this country. 

While it is pleasant to think of the free and 
bountiful ways of the men about whom we 
have been chatting, I am not sure that it is 
wise to lend carelessly. It affords a tempta- 
tion to the unscrupulous and it encourages 
those w^ho should be sternly suppressed, the 
piratical purloiners of books, the shameless 
filchers of personal property. The dangers 
of injudicious lending must not be underrated, 
and many a vacant space on the shelves of 
kind-hearted bookmen testifies that it is not 
always prudent to yield to friendly impulse 
and that there is a disposition on the part of 
the unworthy to convert the books of others 
to their own use. As Laman Blanchard 
wrote in his Art of Book-Keeping, 

How hard, when those who do not wish 

To lend, that's lose, their books 
Are snared by anglers — folks that fish 

With literary hooks. 
Who call and take some favourite tome 

But never read it through, 
They thus complete their set at home 

By making one on you. 

With all his attractive qualities, the col- 
lector has been the victim of the modem 

18 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

nomenclature constructed on a basis of Greek, 
and he has been held up to scorn and ridicule 
under the title of "bibliomaniac," one ^which, 
nevertheless, men like Dibdin have gloried in 
and exalted. It is a much abused word, and 
it is often applied without just discrimina- 
tion. "If a man spends lavishly on his 
library," said Ruskin in Sesame and Lilies, 
"you call him mad — a bibliomaniac, but you 
never call one a horse-maniac, though men 
ruin themselves every day by their horses, and 
you do not hear of people ruining themselves 
by their books." Ruskin, who might v^ell 
have written "hippo-maniac," never heard of 
-course of the sad fate of that unfortunate who 
not long ago was accused of robbing ex- 
tensively for the purpose of obtaining funds 
where^th to purchase costly ec/itio/zs de luxe, 
falsely so called, and whose downfall brought 
to the inevitable auction-block all his loved 
accumulations. They were sold at prices ab- 
surdly disproportionate to their cost: his 
Cooper, which cost him $3,300, going for 
$561, his Dumas, costing $6,000, for $660, and 
his Waverley, costing $5,100, for $510. Sel- 
dom has there been such a pitiful book-dis- 
aster. He was a bibliomane as defined by 
Jean Joseph Rive, quoted by Isaac D'Israeli in 
his Curiosities and again in Burton's Book 

19 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

Hunter, who said "a bibliomaniac is an in- 
discriminate accumulator, who blunders 
faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse- 
heavy." D'Israeli himself in his essay on 
''The Bibliomania" calls that malady "the 
collecting of an enormous heap of books with- 
out intelligent curiosity," which, the dear old 
fellow adds, ''has, since libraries have ex- 
isted, infected weak minds, w^ho imagine that 
they themselves acquire knov^ledge when they 
keep it on their shelves." He condescends, 
however, to joke mildly about it, saying: 
"It was facetiously observed, these collectors 
are not without a Lock on the Human Under- 
standing,^'' and he chuckles in a foot-note over 
the unfortunate Frenchman who translated 
Curiosities of Literature, and v^ith that ex- 
cusable inability, shared with the Scotchman, 
to see the point of an English jest, rendered 
the passage — "mettant, comme on I'a tres- 
judicieusement fait observ^er, I'entendement 
humain sous la clef." Many book-devotees 
will remember the verses of Doctor John 
Ferriar, whose epistle to Richard Heber, 
styled "The Bibliomania" was published in 
1809, beginning 

What wild desires, what restless torments seize 
The helpless man who feels the book-disease. 

Those who are not acquainted with it will 

20 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

find Ferriar's poem in a neat little volume 
called Book Verse y edited by Mr. Roberts and 
published by Elliot Stock in 1896, a charm- 
ing collection designed to gladden the heart 
of the fortunate possessor. 

The term ''bibliomaniac" has come to 
mean a good deal more than is asserted by 
either Rive or D'IsraeH, and every one^vhether 
poor or purse-heavy, whether he blunders or 
not, whether or not he has a curiosity, intelli- 
gent or otherwise, is called a bibliomaniac if 
he has what his fellovr-beings consider to be 
an overweening regard for books, a glorious 
passion for the ownership of them and a pre- 
ference for them over all other earthly things. 
But the bibliophile, defined by the aforesaid 
Abbe Rive as "the lover of books, the only 
one in the class who appears to read them for 
his own pleasure," may well entertain the 
opinion that there is good foundation for 
the charge of mania against some of the fra- 
ternity whose freaks and oddities have made 
them famous — or infamous as you may pre- 
fer — and even against those who have never 
attained notoriety. There is scarcely any 
limit to the whims and caprices of collectors. 
Mr. Rees speaks of a sale in 1883 by Messrs. 
Puttick and Simpson, of "A Unique Collec- 
tion of Illustrated Matchbox Covers." I 

21 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

have told elsewhere of a learned jurist who 
had the fad of gathering old almanacs, and 
there have been people who cherished the 
labels on wine-bottles. Passing by such hob- 
bies as those of miniature books — Sexto- 
decimos et Infra, according to our much- 
honored bookman of Gotham, William Loring 
Andrewrs — and of first editions, because one 
might fill a volume with reflections on themes 
like that, think of the condition of mind of 
him who collects title-pages! Yet he flour- 
ished luxuriantly not so very long ago. 
Almost all students of book-history are ac- 
quainted with the tale of old John Bagford, 
shoemaker and biblioclast — the latter word 
is unknown to the Century Dictionary — 
whose collection of title-pages and fragments 
filled sixty-four folio volumes, or, as Mr. 
Blades will have it, over one hundred volumes. 
One can never be absolutely certain about 
these statistics, and when I have been fortun- 
ate enough to enjoy glimpses of the wonderful 
agglomeration under the dome which looks 
out upon Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury — 
surpassed only by the countless volumes con- 
tained in the Bihliotheque Nationale where 
M. Henri Bouchot, kindly and gracious, will 
unfold to you all the choicest treasures of one 
of the greatest libraries in the world — I have 

22 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

had no leisure to count Bagford's books, but 
I sympathize with Blades when he proclaims 
in righteous indignation, that **when you 
find the colophon from the end or the ' insig- 
num typographi ' from the first leaf of a rare 
* fifteener ' pasted down with dozens of others 
varying in value, you cannot bless the 
memory of the antiquarian shoemaker, John 
Bagford." 

Dibdin says of Bagford that he was "the 
most hungry and rapacious of all book and 
print collectors, and in his ravages he spared 
neither the most delicate nor costly speci- 
mens." I was surprised to see this quotation 
badly mangled by no less a person than 
Richard Gamett in that work of inestimable 
value, the Dictionary of National Biography : 
but perhaps he took it from another edition 
of Bibliomania than the one v^hich I am 
permitted to pore over and to fondle. Bag- 
ford pretended that his depredations, his 
conscienceless mutilations of old volumes, 
were designed to aid him in his contemplated 
General History of Printing which he never 
finished, but I think it was only a manu- 
factured excuse ; and he collected even covers, 
bosses and clasps. He had numerous fol- 
lowers, but Mr. Slater calls our attention to 
the fact that collections of book-titles are not 

23 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

much in evidence of recent years, regarded as 
things rather to be ashamed of, and he 
remarks that **it is abundantly manifest 
that the wicked man hath turned a^cvay from 
much of his wickedness." I will not take up 
the mooted question of ''Grangerizing," for 
it would require a volume to deal with it 
adequately; and I confess that I am a 
besotted and benighted disciple of the Ship- 
lake parson. I v^nll resist the temptation to 
argue the case, for this is a Year Book and 
not a Two- Year Book. 

The devotee of strange and curious bind- 
ings affords occasionally some testimony 
tending to prove that a hobby otherwise 
harmless may be carried to the border-land 
between sanity and the reverse. Percy Fitz- 
gerald, the industrious compiler and book- 
maker, tells us that Mordaunt Cracherode — 
the father of the Reverend Claj^ton Mordaunt 
Cracherode, who was an eminent collector — 
wore one pair of buckskin breeches exclu- 
sively during a voyage around the world, 
and a volume in his son's collection, now in 
the British Museum, "is bound in a part of 
those circumnavigating unmentionables." 
We learn moreover that one offspring of the 
first and great French Revolution was the 
grim humor of binding books in the skin of 

24 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

human beings. There is an octavo volume 
of the trial of Corder for the murder of a 
young -woman named Martin — the Red Bam 
murder, so often told of in books of Criminal 
Trials, — bound in the murderer's skin, 
tanned by some surgeon. Mr. Slater de- 
scribes a copy of Johnson's Lives and Adven- 
tures of the most famous Highwaymen, 
Murderers and Street Robbers — a sweet and 
enlivening work, if we may judge of it by its 
title — bound in human cuticle taken from a 
criminal executed at Tyburn. Owing either 
to dampness or to some imperfection in the 
process of curing, it sweats what seem to be 
great smears of blood. It must be a cheerful 
ornament in a snug and cosy library. 

The story of this appalling book brings to 
my recollection an account which a friend 
gave me a few days ago of a book which is said 
to be in the possession of a gentleman in New 
Orleans. A physician of that city, intending 
to prepare a treatise on yellow fever, heard of 
a -work on the West Indies, published about 
the middle of the eighteenth century, in which 
was given to the world the first account of 
that dire malady. He gave an order to the 
Napoleon of books, as he has been styled, the 
famous Quaritch, who discovered a copy in 
the heart of Spain. This copy had a number 

25 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

of maps and plates, whose blank backs were 
stained with curious brown spots. The 
owner, after careful scrutiny, detected on 
one of the soiled pages the words ^' Sang 
de Marat. ^^ It is said, but I will not vouch 
for the truth of it, that Marat was intending 
to visit the West Indies in the hope of restor- 
ing his shattered health, and it is believed that 
when he was stabbed by Charlotte Corday, 
— **ste^ng in slipper bath," with ''strong, 
three-footed stool for writing on" close by 
him, according to the historian w^hose name 
need not be given for the style bewrays him, 
he may have been reading this verj^ book; 
and "when his life, with a groan, gushed out, 
indignant, to the shades below" those 
pages may have received their sanguinary 
baptism. I have not seen the book and 
I do not comprehend why the maps and 
plates should have been the sole recipients 
of the blood of Marat, as would seem 
to be the case; but while the volume 
must be quite gruesome in its suggestions, 
it has surely an association which entitles it 
to be possessed in a dark corner, to be ex- 
hibited only to those who approach a book 
with a dignified and becoming reverence. It 
must be a melancholy but interesting piece of 
property. 

26 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

I have in my own collection an extra- 
illustrated edition of Dowden's Shelley which 
contains a lock of Wordsworth's hair and 
one of Southey's. I always feel when I look 
at them as if I were in the very presence of 
the illustrious dead. There is a funereal 
taint about them, by no means agreeable, 
like that which clings to the peculiar bindings 
just mentioned. I do not rejoice in such 
mortuary relics; I should much prefer to 
own George Napier's copy of the book about 
the dwarf Jeffrey Hudson, bound in a frag- 
ment of Charles the First's silk Vv^aistcoat, or 
the Duke of Roxburghe's collection of pamph- 
lets about Mary Tofts (who pretended to be 
confined of rabbits) which is appropriately 
bound in rabbit skin. 

It has been said and ^written countless 
times that the collector delights above all 
things in the making of ** lucky finds," in 
** picking up" for a trifle some unique volume, 
and he dreams of such good fortunes as in 
childhood we used to dream of finding 
money. The ** find " must as a rule be associ- 
ated with a small price, or it loses its distinc- 
tive value. There are, however, but few of 
these happy discoveries recorded, and as a 
recent writer has observed, whenever one 
begins to read of them he invariably encoun- 

27 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

ters the same ancient fables, like the Old Hun- 
gerford Market tale and the story of Dame 
Juliana Berners's Boke of St. Albans in 
Thomeck Hall. I have long indulged in the 
pleasing hope that somehow and somewhere 
I myself might, in my ^wanderings, achieve 
something in the Tvay of a "find" whereof 
during the remainder of my life I might boast, 
with that peculiar self-satisfaction exhibited 
by those w^ho congratulate themselves on the 
making of a good bargain. My nearest 
approach to it was in Rome, a year ago, w^hen 
in one of the shops where the innocent 
American purchases what he fondly believes 
to be antiques, there chanced to be, among 
the rubbish of shabby vases and broken 
statuettes, a casual volume in old mottled 
calf, w^ith red edges, lonesome and desolate in 
the midst of the dubious bric-a-brac. After a 
peep at the title and the fly-leaf, I pocketed it 
with glee, and the proprietor, more interested 
in selling his alleged antiquities than in 
''mere literature," accepted an insignificant 
number of lire with apparent satisfaction. 
It w^as a copy of the first edition of the Tan- 
crede of Voltaire, not particularly scarce, it is 
true, but it was the copy which the author 
presented in 1761 to the famous lawyer- 
dramatist of Venice, Carlo Goldoni, whose 

28 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

marble statue looks out upon the Ponte Alia 
Carraja in Florence, and it bears upon the 
last page, in Goldoni's handwriting, the 
words ''Proprieta dell' avocato Carlo Gol- 
doni, Veneto." 

Much has been wrritten of the Tvanton ex- 
travagance of book-collectors ; of the squan- 
dering of their scanty means in the acquisition 
of much that is without substantial value, 
and of their depriving themselves of even the 
necessities of life in order to gratify their un- 
holy passion for choice books. A pretty piece 
of fiction has been published recently ^which 
has this idea for its motif. The collector's 
wife, unsympathetic and sorely afflicted, 
grieving over her ragged babes and lamenting 
the vagaries of her liege lord, is a familiar 
character in imaginary chronicles. There is 
but a slight foundation for these fables, and 
the collector's v^ife is usually as enthusiastic 
as he is about the fascinating pursuit, often 
urging him to increase his store ; but I v^ill 
own that sometimes, but not very often, the 
purchase of a long-coveted volume incident- 
ally involves an investment in a new dress or 
in a hat the like of v^hich is not preserved in the 
British Museum. My observation teaches 
me that, excepting the very rich men who are 
well able to afford the buying of Shakespeare 

29 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

folios and Golden Gospels, the collector is ex- 
tremely prudent in his expenditures. *' Care- 
fully and judiciously pursued," says the gentle 
Mr. Rees in his Pleasures of a Book-Worm^ 
"the collecting of books is not expensive and 
is likely to ruin no one." The world at large 
is fond of cherishing delusions and of perpet- 
uating fallacies ; for which reason the general 
public wholly overestimates the folly of the 
book-buyer. The public judgment is not 
infallible, and hence I think we should not 
disturb ourselves unduly about its opinions. 
As now and then there are great misers, 
there are once and awhile men who seem to 
aim only at amassing an enormous number of 
books ; men like our old friend Magliabecchi, 
who lived in a kind of cave made of piles of 
books, covering floor, bed and all the house 
with books. When he wished to sleep he 
would repose in a sort of v^ooden cradle, 
lined with pamphlets, which he slung between 
his shelves, or he would throw a rug over the 
books on the floor and stretch himself upon 
them. Heber bought libraries without seeing 
them, and at the sale of his collection in 1834 
and succeeding years, 119,613 volumes were 
disposed of, realizing £56,774. He is said to 
have collected in England alone 127,500 
volumes and he probably owned at one time 

30 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

between 145,000 and 150,000 books. That 
is too many for genuine interest and enjoy- 
ment. But Heber pales in the presence of the 
Frenchman Boulard, the greatest buyer of 
old books during the last century, who 
"bought books by the metre, by the toise, 
and by the acre, and who left 300,000 vol- 
umes." There are not many persons so 
unreasonably covetous ; and the Miser Helluo 
Libroranif melodiously and metrically dealt 
with by Mr. Dole a year ago, is more fre- 
quently encountered in literature than in 
actual life. 

Mr. A. P. Russell, in his interesting volume, 
Id a Club Comer, refers to the story of the 
oriental king whose library was so large 
that it required one hundred persons to take 
care of it and a thousand dromedaries to 
transport it. He ordered all useless matter 
weeded out and after thirty years' labor it 
was reduced to the capacity of thirty camels. 
Still appalled by the number of volumes, he 
ordered it to be condensed to a single drome- 
dary load, and when the task was completed, 
age had crept upon him and death awaited 
him. I do not attempt to explain the moral, 
for every one will explain it to suit himself. 
I believe, however, that when the private 
library is swollen to an extent which forbids 

31 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

a personal relation between the owner and 
each particular volume, it ceases to be what 
it ought to be, a comfort and a consolation, a 
precious possession, whose value is scarcely to 
be measured in mere money. 

It is a temptation to ramble aimlessly 
through the broad field in which for so many 
centuries the book-collector has disported him- 
self, and which has been explored with such 
diligence that it is not unlike the surface of 
our terrestrial globe, trotted over so thorough- 
ly that few nooks and corners remain undis- 
covered and untrodden. With the enormous 
increase in the production of books — they 
appear so profusely that we are likely to suffer 
from a fit of literary as well as of financial 
indigestion — I fancy that before the century 
is much older the old-fashioned, all-absorbing 
collector may be destined to join the ranks of 
the disappearing fauna, like the bison, whose 
numbers have been reduced almost to anni- 
hilation by the disastrous effects of civiliza- 
tion. Yet there will always be a few who 
will cling to the traditions. They will pre- 
serve the traits and characteristics of the 
earnest enthusiasts whose names are cher- 
ished in the hearts of all who regard the book 
as a thing apart from the mean and sordid in 
life, men about whom the elder D' Israeli 

32 



THE BOOK COLLECTOR 

wrote and the fantastic Dibdin prattled so 
voluminously. They will not be concerned 
chiefly about the value of their hoards in the 
market-place; they will have, it may be, a 
gentle and pardonable vanity in the owner- 
ship of some treasure which others cannot 
procure ; they will be proud of their posses- 
sions and a little scornful of the Philistine 
who is ignorant of their merit ; but they will 
be, as they have alw^ays been, happy, kindly, 
and fond of research in the records of the 
past ; not strenuous or over-eager in the pur- 
suit of fame or of fortune, but usefiil in their 
modest way, sympathetic and fiiU to the brim 
with love for their fellow-men. For no man 
can be a true lover of books who does not 
also love his brothers. 



33 



CONCERNING 

A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

OF THE GREAT 



CONCERNING 

A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

OF THE GREAT 

AS THE fortunate individuals ^^ho are 
possessed of what the world calls great- 
ness are necessarily different in capacity and 
endowments from the general body of the 
people, it is perhaps natural that they should 
observe the affairs of life from a point of view 
more elevated and commanding than that 
which is occupied by ordinary human beings. 
It is for this reason, no doubt, that they fre- 
quently display what we of humbler station 
are accustomed to characterize as affecta- 
tions. Those who have devoted time and 
labor to the study of the lives of great men 
and women, in order that we may be in- 
structed how to **make our lives sublime," 

37 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

will not need to be reminded of particular in- 
stances nor to be convinced by the production 
of testimony tending to establish the verity of 
the proposition. We are all familiar with the 
truth that such persons, for example, as 
Louis XIV., Queen Elizabeth, Napoleon, 
General Winfield Scott, Horace Greeley and 
the Kaiser Wilhelm were or are mere bundles 
of affectations. 

I was moved to indulge in these profound 
reflections by the perusal of some remarks in 
the ** Contributors' Club " in a recent number 
of the Atlantic Monthly^ entitled "A Great 
Person and Certain Bores." The writer 
announces that he (or she) "has lately been 
private secretary and literary adviser to a 
Great Person," and contributes to the en- 
lightenment of mankind this gem of wisdom : 

"The worst enemy to the Great Person is 
the autograph collector. Now, the collector 
who buys with good money autographs that 
are already on paper, or who begs from his 
friends, or who knows celebrities well enough 
to ask them to their faces for their signatures, 
may be, and I am sure is, a great nuisance. 
But he is not a foe to society." 

I have elsewhere expressed the opinion, 
founded partly upon knowledge acquired by 
a careful examination of written and printed 

38 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

records and partly upon facts derived from 
personal observation, that the truly great 
are not really as sadly bored by requests for 
autographs as minor magnates of literature 
and of politics would have an admiring multi- 
tude beHeve. I shall not, however, attempt to 
justify or to defend the "pestilential nui- 
sance "who ** vvrrites for autographs," as he is 
called by the eminent Mr. W. S. Gilbert. There 
is no need of heaping upon the head of such a 
pseudo-collector any further epithets of scorn. 
Let us say that he is an impertinent intruder 
and a worm, and let it go at that. A^v^ay 
with him! What is of interest to me is to 
observe that the Great appear to have de- 
veloped their affectation so far as to denounce 
for a nuisance a man who "buys with good 
money autographs that are already on 
paper." What terms of contempt would be 
employed to crush the person who bought 
them with forged notes or with counterfeit 
coin, or who purchased autographs inscribed 
upon brass, or bronze, or imperishable marble, 
or who made contracts for the future delivery 
of autographs in the confident expectation of 
a rise in the market value of autographs, I 
dare not imagine, but let us for a moment 
examine the merits of the charge preferred by 
no less a personage than a former "private 

39 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

secretary and literary adviser to a Great 
Person." 

It may not profit us to consider what may 
be the duties of a literary adviser to a Great 
Female Person. A really Great Person fre- 
quently needs the help of a private secretary, 
but surely not the services of a literary ad- 
viser, if that title is to be taken in its ordinary 
and obvious signification. It maybe that the 
Great Female Person ought at times to be 
told what kinds of books are appropriate to 
particular hours of the day, or what styles 
and colors of binding harmonize most effect- 
ively with certain gowns or with the furniture 
of the apartment devoted to the study of the 
works of the poets, philosophers or word- 
painters of the past. It may be that the 
Great Person has inaccurate ideas of the spell- 
ing of English words or of the construction of 
English sentences, but I cannot believe that 
she needs to be advised, for example, that she 
must not prefer Alfred Austin to Milton, or 
discard Stubbs, Freeman and John Richard 
Green in favor of the writers of modem his- 
torical fiction. The inquiry may, however, be 
deferred. It is enough for the moment to say 
that the Atlantic article contains conclusive, 
intrinsic evidence that the Great Female Per- 
son mentioned in it is great, not by reason of 

40 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

intellect or achieYement, but solely because 
of inherited riches; and that the ex-private 
secretary and ex-literary adviser, notwith- 
standing a cunning little phrase inserted with 
intent to deceive, is also one of the bright, 
alluring, charming and illogical sex, whose 
members are, w^e are assured, in our hours of 
ease uncertain, coy and hard to please, and 
who rise to their loftiest sphere only in those 
uncomfortable moments vyrhen pain and 
anguish wring the brow. We may even be 
right in regarding this fabricator of libels 
upon harmless collectors as actually a much 
Greater Person than the wealthy lady who 
required her literary advice and counsel, and I 
am sure that I would value her autograph far 
more highly, unless, as a million autograph 
writers at least are accustomed to say, at the 
foot of a cheque. 

Verily, the judgment delivered by the ex- 
adviser whereby she decrees that the collector 
who buys constitutes himself a nuisance, 
shows her imperfect acquaintance with the 
facts and the law. I fear that she promul- 
gated it without due attention to the injunc- 
tion audi alteram partem. If there were any 
Court of Appeal of competent jurisdiction, 
that court would reverse it without hesita- 
tion, for manifest error appearing upon its 

41 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

face. The true collector, as we well know, 
does not "beg from his friends" — it is not 
necessary. Nor does he ask celebrities for 
their signatures. He cares little or nothing 
for the mere signatures of living persons. He 
would no more think of asking a great man 
for his signature than a numismatist would 
think of asking him for a silver dime. It is 
one of the delusions of the half-educated that 
autograph collectors — excepting only the 
lower orders, the triflers, — prize signatures. 
To be sure, a signature of Shakespeare, or of 
Julius Caesar, or of Judas Iscariot would be 
valuable, for reasons which even the ignorant 
can readily understand. But nobody in this 
incarnation is likely to trouble any of these 
personages for a specimen of his handwriting. 
We need not pause to consider the case of the 
beggar or of the gatherer of ** signatures by 
request." We are concerned only v^'ith him 
w^ho ''buys with good money." It is such a 
collector whom the ex-Adviser addresses in 
an imaginary epistle wherein she saucily 
says : '' If you are grown up and hardened in 
evil ways, if you are a professional collector 
of great men's letters and relics, you ought to 

be ." Perhaps in private and not in print 

the ex-Adviser uses language not becoming in 
a self-respecting female. 

42 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

We come then to the allegation that the 
collector who buys the letters and relics of 
great men is a nuisance, hardened in evil 

ways, who ought to be whatever the lady 

decrees by way of punishment. 

The accuser admits that such a collector is 
**not a foe to society." For this, much 
thanks. But when, oh Adviser, you tell us 
that one wrho is hardened in evil ways is not 
a foe to society, you would have us believe 
that your society has no foe in him wrho is an 
evil doer ; wherefore your society must either 
have an evil doer as its friend, or it must be 
indifferent to his evil deeds. This comes of 
too long an association with the rich. 

But why is the collector who buys, a nuis- 
ance? A nuisance is something which pro- 
duces not only annoyance but injury to some 
one. The acquisition and preservation of let- 
ters and manuscripts of distinguished persons 
is surely not of itself injurious to any one. It 
is neither malum prohibitum nor malum^ in se. 
If it w^ere, the libraries and museums of the 
civilized world must be relegated to the 
category of nuisances and their founders and 
promoters must be evil doers indeed. If in the 
Vatican the exposure of a letter of Martin 
Luther or in the Bodleian the display of a fine 
example of George Washington's familiar 

43 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

chirography is in the nature of a nuisance, 
then let the ex-Adviser, in the words of 
Patrick Henry, "make the most of it." If in 
the privacy of my den I preserve with fond- 
ness the manuscript of Barry Cornwall's Life 
of Lamb, or of a story or poem by Charlotte 
Bronte, or of an epic of Southey, or of an 
essay of Irving, or of some poems of Swin- 
burne; if I love to read and to caress the 
letters of Tennyson, of Browning, of Words- 
worth, of Charles Lamb, or of our own 
Longfellow, Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, in what respect are the sensibilities 
of even a feminine literary adviser disturbed 
or wounded ? If I should make an improper 
use of the intimate and familiar confidences of 
any writer, so as to give pain to his friends, I 
might be justly censured ; but it is not of such 
disclosures or publications that the criticism 
is made. Indeed such disclosures usually 
come from the friends themselves — seldom or 
never from collectors. The indictment relates 
only to the collection and ownership of auto- 
graph letters. Surely we are right in dis- 
missing the bill of complaint for want of 
equity and to regard the careless utterance as 
merely an instance of a common and un- 
worthy affectation on the part of Great Per- 
sons carried to an absurd extreme. 

44 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION 

Seriously, my skull is not so thick nor my 
skin so thin that I do not discern in this 
screed of the Adviser an attempt at the 
lightly humorous. It is, however, humor of 
a cheap and rather time-worn vein. The late 
Irving Browne said that to call a lawyer a 
liar, a physician a murderer and a clergyman 
a hypocrite was the favorite amusement of a 
numerically considerable portion of mankind. 
It is also a delight to the mildly facetious to 
read in the columns of the ordinary news- 
paper the stale and common jests about the 
somnolent policeman, the sugar-sanding gro- 
cer and the dishonest Sunday-school superin- 
tendent. These flat and arid pleasantries 
may perhaps be harmless, but I think that the 
pages of an honored and dignified magazine 
might be employed to better purpose than in 
disseminating silliness, the humor of which is 
so subtle that many casual readers may take 
it as if it were written in sober earnest. To 
endeavor to bring into ridicule a useful and 
meritorious occupation is unworthy of a pub- 
lication as venerable and as highly respected 
as the Atlantic Monthly. 



45 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

UPON the principle of dichotomous divi- 
sion, mankind may be said to consist of 
two classes, — those who collect autographs 
and those who do not. I am addressing my- 
self to the second and numerically larger class, 
for to the others I can impart little or nothing 
of interest or of value. They know it aU 
themselves. 

A well-beloved friend, known in the world 
of literature, said not long ago, in a lecture 
delivered before the students of a neighboring 
University, that there were four methods of 
getting autographs — that is to say, by recep- 
tion, by gift, by purchase, and by theft. I do 
not reproduce his exact words, but only my 
recollection of them as he repeated them to 
me while we were enjoying a sociable cigar on 
the pleasant piazza of "The Inn." He did 

49 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

not refer to a fifth method, adopted only by 
fiends, which may be styled *' extortion," 
possibly because he regarded it as only a 
species of the genus theft. It is the devotee of 
extortion who makes the honorable guild 
of autograph collectors unjustly odious in 
the sight of the world. He surely over- 
looked other ways and means, which may 
be mentioned hereafter. 

I have endeavored elsewhere in a mild and 
humble manner to vindicate the lover of auto- 
graphs, truly so-called, but I fear that my 
well-meant effort has not been overwhelming- 
ly successful. An acquaintance who made 
false pretense of having read the dissertation, 
said smilingly to me, *' Why, I used to collect 
autographs myself when I was a boy," un- 
consciously classing the pursuit with the 
feeble strivings of childhood. But it is not 
my purpose to make a brief for the plaintiff in 
the cause of the autograph-hunter against 
the scoffer. He who does not comprehend 
intuitively the good there is in the collecting 
of autographs will never be convinced by all 
the logic of the schools. It must come to him 
like an appreciation of Tintoretto. 

In many instances the utterances of those 
who abuse collectors are the result of mere 
ignorance. At a sale early in the present 

50 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

year a number of autograph letters were dis- 
posed of by auction, including some of Henry 
Clay and other American public men, which 
realized only small sums, and one of King 
Edward VII., ^v^ritten when he w^as Prince of 
Wales, and addressed to Mrs. Langtry, for 
which royal effusion some misguided but 
enthusiastic individual paid ninety dollars. 
Straightway even such journals as the New 
York Times and the Evening' Post, which 
make some pretensions to decency and good 
taste, broke forth in clamor; one of them, — I 
do not now recall v^hich one, — sneering at the 
alleged value of collecting as a preservative of 
literary and historical treasures, and the 
other announcing with oracular finality that 
the incident proved the fact that autograph 
collectors are mere snobs. Of course if the 
Tvrriters of these rather shallov^ screeds had 
been well informed they would have under- 
stood that the low prices of the great Ameri- 
cans was occasioned by the profusion of the 
supply — the statesmen of Clay's time must 
have written letters by the mile — and that, 
say v^hat those apostles of refinement, the 
newspaper critics, will, there are vast num- 
bers of people of at least equal refinement, 
Tvho would gaze with interest and curiosity 
on a letter from a King to a famous actress 

51 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

but who would cast an indifferent eye upon a 
long and eloquent epistle of Clay or of Web- 
ster. As to the snobbishness of it, the chances 
are that the bidder was a little of a "crank,'* 
or that there were two agents, each instructed 
to purchase but without any directions as to 
a limit. I once innocently made a good friend 
pay seven hundred dollars for some things 
which were not worth half the money, be- 
cause my agent, whose limit was only on the 
aggregate, bid up each item against bis agent 
to so high a point that the total reached an 
absurd amount. Be that as it may, to de- 
nounce all collectors as snobs because one of 
them paid ninety dollars for King Edward's 
autograph is an excellent example of our old 
acquaintance in college days, the fallacy of 
the undistributed middle. As well might we 
say that because some of our metropolitan 
journals reek with sensation, crime, and foul- 
ness, all newspapers are disreputable and 
dirty. 

We will assume as a postulate that it must 
be of benefit to gather into one's possession 
the veritable writings of the famous, the 
things which their own hands made, and we 
will consider the way of the man with the 
autograph. 

A notable thing it is, indeed, to receive from 

52 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

a person of distinction, an autograph letter 
addressed to one's self, voluntarily, without 
previous solicitation. Obviously it must be 
only the favored fev^ who are able to point 
proudly to letters of that order; men like 
James T. Fields, Charles Oilier, the publisher, 
Elliot Danforth, or Laurence Hutton. I 
believe that the genial Landmarker refuses to 
admit any other sort within the attractive 
boundaries of his collection. It is not pleas- 
ant to think that at some day such treasures 
must either be added to the multitude of mar- 
ketable autographs or be buried irretrievably 
in some splendid library where nobody v^ill 
pay much attention to them. I am confident 
that the surest way of consigning to oblivion 
a collection of autographs is to bestow it 
upon a public library, over v^hose glass-cov- 
ered cases may well be inscribed lasciate ogni 
speranza, A few framed specimens like the 
fine George Washington on the walls of the 
Bodleian, which stirs with pride the heart of 
the American visitor, are suitable enough, 
but an autograph collection is not to be 
stored away in locked cabinets or in steel- 
bound vaults. It is something to be played 
with, to be paw^ed over, to be arranged and 
rearranged, perpetually to be added to, en- 
larged, revised and improved. It should be 

53 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

free from the intrusion of paste and of albums. 
It should be protected by wrappers or by 
portfolios only, except perhaps in the case of 
complete "sets," such as ''Signers of the De- 
claration," "Presidents," "Kings of Eng- 
land," "Napoleon's Marshals," or "Generals 
of the Revolution, ' ' and these, when completed 
and associated with the best of portraits, 
may be enshrined by our pet binder in the 
richest of crushed levant, or in the more dur- 
able pig-skin which that dean of collectors, 
Doctor Thomas Emmet, is said to prefer over 
all other kinds of binding. 

It is also a delightful thing to acquire the 
autograph hj gift, and the soul of the col- 
lector expands with emotion v^hen he con- 
templates the charming specimens bestowed 
upon him by bountiful friends. I cannot for- 
get my OAvn joy over the rare letter of Jean 
Paul Richter, sent to me by a generous 
brother-lawyer, Mr. Theodore Aub, or the 
manuscript notes of a speech of Daniel Web- 
ster, which came from that worthy book- 
lover, Mr. Gore of Boston, or the Rufus 
Choate manuscript, a portentous array of 
wild scrawlings, the gift of another New York 
lawyer, endowed v^ith a genuine affection 
for that which is good and instructive, George 
h. Nichols; or the benefactions of many 

64 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

others wlio appreciate the feelings of a col- 
lector. My ponderous portfolios of Contin- 
ental Congressmen would be sadly deficient 
but for the generosity of Danforth and Green- 
ough. It speaks in no uncertain accents of 
the altruism of collectors, this fondness for 
helping others ; I confess I do not discover it 
in any other class of collectors. How much 
dear old Doctor Sprague did to enlarge the 
happiness of his brother-collectors ! 

George Wilham Curtis, that true literary 
artist, must have been one of the few who 
realize that it is more blessed to give than to 
receive, when he parted with the notelet over 
which I am rejoicing at the present moment: 

*' My dear Curtis : Who can be the friend who asks for 
the signature of the unhappy 

W. M. Thackeray?" 

I do not know who that friend was, but he 
deserved summary and condign punishment 
because he asked for a signature only. He 
who begs for a signature is lost. He has not 
attained the lowest round of the ladder ; he 
has the same relation to the kingdom of col- 
lection as the patent medicine advertisement 
has to literature or which the lad with his 
hoard of postage-stamps has to Beverly 
Chew or to Howard Mansfield. I shall never 
feel that I have done my duty as a citizen 

55 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

until I shall have secured the adoption of an 
amendment to the Constitution making the 
solicitation of an autograph signature equiv- 
alent to an overt act of treason. 

Not many of us are fortunate enough to 
have the help of such assistants as the im- 
mortal Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 
whose masterpiece, according to Donald G. 
Mitchell, will go with Montaigne, with the 
essays of Goldsmith, a;nd v^ith **Elia," upon 
one of the low^ shelves where it can be easily 
reached and where it will always help to give 
joy in the reading. No one likes to climb 
steps to get the books he cherishes most 
fondly. The sweet doctor's letter, in his clear, 
flowing hand, is under my eyes as I write : 

"Beverly Farms, Mass., August 21st, 1879. 
" My Dear Longfellow : 

I send you a letter of Mr. Frederick Locker with a re- 
quest which I know you will comply with. The daughter 
he refers to, as you may remember, married Tennyson's 
son. If you would have the kindness, after writing the 
lines marked for yourself, to send the whole letter and all, 
to Emerson, he to Whittier, and Whittier to me, I should 
feel in sending back the manuscript that I had made Mr. 
Locker happy, and that I should be glad to do, for he has 
shown me much kindness, though I have never seen him. 
I cannot help the fact that his letter has a few compli- 
mentary words about myself — you can skip those, if you 
will read the rest. Always faithfully yours, 

O. W. Holmes." 

56 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

I am told by those \^ho kne^w him that 
Frederick Locker (later calling himself, for 
pecuniary reasons, Frederick Locker-Lamp- 
son), who wrote the excellent London 
LyricSy -was personally unpleasant, disagree- 
able, and repellent. But if any man who 
loves books or the makers of books pauses to 
ponder over the kindly epistle of our beloved 
Holmes, his imagination must surely be 
stimulated when he reflects that it was 
written by the witty poet and essayist, who 
is one of our dearest possessions; that it 
passed through the hands of the greater 
poet — perhaps not as lovable as the Auto- 
crat — to whom it v^as addressed; and that 
it reminds us of the accomplished author, 
v^ho may have been uncomfortable to meet 
but v^ho wrote charmingly, and whose inter- 
esting Confidences recall the literary life of 
London in his day. It recalls also the daugh- 
ter-in-la^w of the great Laureate, and the 
wonderful New Englanders, Emerson and 
Whittier, who certainly did not refuse to 
comply with a request so sweetly made. 
The most contemptuous reviler of our tribe 
must confess that such a gentle intervention 
as that of Holmes gives testimony to the 
worth and dignity of our occupation. 
Not unlike the Autocrat's letter is this one 

57 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

addressed to Curtis which I am pleased to 
have in my collection. 

"SuNNYsroE, September 12th, 1854. 
" My Dear Mr. Curtis: 

I hasten to furnish the autographs you request for 
those two 'enthusiastic, lovely and sensible' young 
ladies of whom you speak. During the prevalence of the 
autograph mania it is quite a relief to have such fair and 
interesting applicants. 

Yours very truly 

Washington Irving. 
"George "W. Curtis Esq." 

It is comical to observe the old bachelor's 
willingness to oblige pretty girls, as if their 
requests for autographs were less tiresome 
than those of the thing called man. But 
Irving was always fond of feminine society, 
true as he was to the memory of the one 
whom he lost in her girlhood. 

Another means of obtaining autographs, 
which may be a sub-head under the title 
** Gift, "is exchange. There was more ex- 
changing done in the earlier days than now. 
Perhaps the most distinguished instance on 
record is that one described in the books, 
when Doctor William B. Sprague, the re- 
nowned pioneer in our ranks, parted with the 
only known letter of Thomas Lynch, Jr., 
written to General Washington on July 5, 
1777. It went to Dr. Emmet in a barter, 

58 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

practically costing him $700, according to 
the testimony of Dr. Lyman C. Draper, -who 
published a volume about the signers of the 
Declaration of Independence and the signers 
of the Constitution. Lynch, the youthful 
signer, ^who \vas lost at sea ^when only thirty 
years old, ranks with Button Gwinnett, of 
Georgia, as the rarest of the noble company. 
Gwinnett left no holograph letters, as far as 
my information goes, but there are several 
autograph documents of his which are almost 
as valuable as letters ^would be. Dr. Sprague 
had the good fortune to knov7 Judge Bushrod 
Washington, and obtained his permission to 
select w^hatever he pleased from the volumi- 
nous correspondence of the General, leaving 
copies of those he desired to possess. He 
chose above fifteen hundred, among them the 
unrivaled Lynch, the envy and despair of 
modem American collectors ^who must needs 
be content with '* cut " signatures. It is said 
that the fortunate owner once refused $5,000 
for it, and it, is now the property of the New 
York Public Library. 

My literary friend who enumerated four 
ways of gathering autographs, overlooked 
inheritance, as v^ell as extortion and ex- 
change. The Leflingwell collection was be- 
queathed to a niece of the original collector : 

59 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

part of Dr. Sprague's went to his son, a re- 
spected lawyer in New York, who transferred 
it to the accomphshed Albanian and enter- 
taining after-dinner speaker, John Boyd 
Thacher: T. Bailey Meyers left his large 
accumulations to his son and daughter, from 
whom they have passed to join the Emmet 
collection in the New York Library ; and Mrs. 
Ely, of Providence, who is almost a unique 
example of a w^oman-collector, handed down 
her stores to her daughter and to her grand- 
son. But I question whether an inherited 
collection ever appeals strongly to the 
legatee; the taste itself must be inherited, 
and it does not pass by testamentary dis- 
position. 

It is the fate of most collections to be 
dispersed, and in my copy of Draper's book, 
I have inserted a letter of worthy old Dominie 
Sprague, in which he writes, character- 
istically: **If you happen to have any du- 
plicates, and will tell me what they are, and 
which you want, I will see if I can accommo- 
date you by an exchange. When I began to 
collect autographs I was the intimate friend 
and correspondent of Robert Gilmour, of your 
city — the first collector I ever knew. But it 
is long since his collection was sold and, I sup- 
pose, scattered to the winds." Gilmour (or 

60 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

Gilmor) was of Baltimore, and some of his 
quondam possessions rest now in my own 
collection, to be dispersed again, I know, in 
the course of time. 

Most of us acquire our autographs as 
Major General Stanley acquired his ancestors 
— by purchase; from dealers, from private 
owners, and from sales at auction. It is said 
that auction sales of autographs began in 
London in the early part of the last century, 
and since 1823 they have been quite frequent 
not only in England but in Paris, in New 
York, in Boston and in Philadelphia. It is 
not at all a romantic or a picturesque w^ay, 
and one cannot grow very loquacious or 
gossipy about such purely mercantile trans- 
actions. As in the case of books, the auction 
prices seldom afford any just criterion of 
value. There may be an enthusiast, bent 
upon gaining certain items, w^ho will run up 
the prices to fabulous heights, and again 
there may be occasions when, by reason of 
indifference or of inadequate advertising, the 
finest specimens are knocked down for a 
trifling sum, but generally to professionals. 
I never got a bargain in my life; and if an 
amateur shows himself at such sales he is 
promptly frozen out by a combination of the 
dealers. Usually it is better to treat with 

61 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

one of the regular tradesmen in autographs ; 
the private vender is commonly impossible. 
The dealer will ask more than his w^ares are 
really worth, but we must make due allow- 
ance, and as most of us are engaged in other 
pursuits demanding a fairly constant atten- 
tion, one ought to pay him for the time he 
saves us as well as for his expert judgment, 
and the money is not thrown away. It is 
curious to observe that some American 
autographs are very dear in England, and 
most English autographs are correspondingly 
dear in New York. This is of little moment 
to the money-kings who have taken to auto- 
graph collecting, and who think nothing of 
sweeping up a collection of thousands while 
we humbler disciples are conscious of guilt if 
we timidly venture a few hundred dollars 
after much pondering and self-castigation. 
Yet I believe that he who painfully brings 
together his beloved scraps piece-meal, by 
unaided toil and research, derives more 
pleasure from it than those can realize who 
purchase at wholesale. 

As to theft and extortion, it is well not to 
go into distressing details. I do not justify 
the larceny of an autograph letter for pur- 
poses of gain, but when I am permitted to 
browse peacefully in some fat letter-book 

62 



REMARKS ABOUT AUTOGRAPHS 

appertaining to a Philistine, who knows not 
the joys of collecting, I am sorely tempted 
to purloin that which means nothing to him 
but much to me. Hitherto I have sternly 
resisted the voice of the tempter. 

Why comes temptation, but for man to meet 
And master, and make crouch beneath his foot, 
And so be pedestaled in triumph. 

A confiding friend once admitted to me that 
he had stolen a set of autographs and years 
afterward, tortured by conscience, had made 
restitution to the true owner, who had never 
missed them. I have forgiven the caitiff who 
robbed me of a precious manuscript volume 
in the hand-writing of Madame de Main- 
tenon. I prized it highly, but he must have 
felt such a strong affection for it that he was 
unable to fight against the impulse to have it 
for his own. It was a book of religious 
reflections, and I hope it will do him good; 
yet he never can be very happy with it. 

The London Athenaeum observed in 1855 
that "the story of what History owes to the 
autograph collectors would make a pretty 
book." That book has never yet been 
written, but I intend to write it in that 
happy period of life when a man has time to 
do as he pleases. 



63 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

Address before the Maryland State Bar 
Association, July 26, 1900. 

THE honor of an invitation to address a 
body of representative lawyers of a great 
State is one which no man can receive with- 
out a sense of grateful appreciation. In most 
instances he is rejoiced to think that perhaps 
something which he has said or done in the 
course of his professional life may have at- 
tracted some attention or aroused some inter- 
est. But on the present occasion the lawyer 
who appears before you is wholly unaware 
of anything in the annals of a quiet existence 
which has entitled him to the privilege of 
addressing the Association of the Bar of the 
State of Maryland. You must not regard his 
expression of conscious unworthiness as 
merely formal or conventional, for it is sin- 
cere. The ordinary, practicing attorney who 
has seldom strayed from the seclusion of an 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

office into forensic fields or parliamentary 
paths may scarcely hope to be able to impart 
anything in the nature of information or of 
instruction, anything of interest or of value, 
to the men who are the legitimate descend- 
ants of Daniel Dulaney, of Charles Carroll, 
'*the barrister," and of Samuel Chase, 
and who trace their professional lineage 
through Luther Martin, William Pinkney, 
Roger Brooke Taney and Reverdy Johnson. 
But it was not easy to resist the temptation 
to desert for a season the hot and stony 
streets of a metropolitan city in order to 
enjoy, if only for a brief period, the charm of 
the companionship of lawyers who have not 
suffered the sordid trade-spirit of modem 
times to dull the brightness of their profes- 
sional escutcheons and who have preserved 
so effectively the dignity of professional tradi- 
tions. Not unfamiliar with the honorable 
history of the bench and bar of Maryland, 
asserting a right as a brother lawyer to 
share in the pride w^hich you must feel in the 
record of your noble past and your successful 
present, I ask, and I am sure that I shall 
receive, your kindly indulgence. 

In considering what I may, with your per- 
mission, present to you, and mindful of the 
fact that I can hardly expect to add anything 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

to your store of kno^edge or to suggest to 
you anything ^which has not already been 
fully mastered and comprehended by every 
one of your number, my thoughts naturally 
turn to that department of our profession 
with which circumstances have united to give 
me a certain familiarity — the department of 
corporation law. I assume that the speaker 
of to-day is to talk about some topic con- 
nected with the jurisprudence of our country, 
however dry and juiceless it may be ; and I 
may perhaps be pardoned for saying that I 
do not knoTv of any subject so extremely dry 
and so absolutely juiceless as the one which I 
have resolved to select. Yet there is an inter- 
est about it, a contemporaneous human in- 
terest, for it touches our pockets as well as 
our brains. 

During the present generation corporations 
have assumed a degree of importance greater 
than has ever been attained by mere business 
organizations. Questions affecting corporate 
enterprises have become, legally and socially, 
among the most interesting of our time. The 
concentration of wealth in the hands of men 
who control these artificial personalities has 
seriously affected the course and conduct of 
modem life. The lawyer, trained in the 
study of the rules which govern civilized 

69 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

countries, finds himself face to face with 
serious problems which not only involve the 
interests of those for whom he serves as a 
paid counsellor, but which aflfect him in a 
much broader and important relation — the 
relation which he bears towards the com- 
munity in which he is, or ought to be, an ad- 
viser, a guide, a leader, and an eflfective force. 

It will not, however, in my judgment, be 
fitting on an occasion like this to enter upon 
a consideration of the advantages or dis- 
advantages of the growth of corporations or 
to endeavor to measure the probable efiect of 
these powerful financial combinations upon 
our national prosperity or upon the ultimate 
happiness of our people, particularly at a 
time when the approach of a Presidential elec- 
tion has drawn the subject into the domain 
of parties and of politics "where wise men 
fear to tread." We are not likely to arrive at 
just or accurate conclusions in the midst of 
the stress and storms of partisan struggles. 

I shall speak to you, therefore, only upon 
some features of technical la^w which relate to 
a single class of corporations — our rail- 
ways — and which pertain to what are 
known as "railway reorganizations." 

The wonderful development of the railways 
of the United States during the latter half of 

70 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

the present century has resulted in adding a 
new department to our systems of finance 
and jurisprudence. While this new depart- 
ment embraces corporate properties of every 
description, it derives its importance mainly 
from its relation to railroads. Railway re- 
organizations have come to be familiar 
things. The term ''reorganization" may be 
subject to criticism, for it is not always 
accurate. As a rule, neither the railway 
nor the corporation, nor the affairs 
of the corporation, are ''reorganized." A 
transfer of the corporate property to a new- 
corporation whose evidences of debt and 
shares of capital stock are distributed under 
some plan, whereby the creditors, and some- 
times the stockholders, of the formerly exist- 
ing company are permitted to receive inter- 
ests in the assets of the newr company, is a 
transaction which may be more appropriately 
regarded as a compromise, settlement or 
adjustment; although there are instances 
arising under the statutes of some of the 
States, and even, as in the case of the Texas 
Pacific and the Chesapeake and Ohio Com- 
panies, and of Maryland's great historic rail- 
way, the Baltimore and Ohio Company, 
where there has been, by consent of all, a 
voluntary reorganization, or, more properly, 

71 



/ 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

a ** recapitalization." Still, it is a compre- 
hensive and expressive term, and the public 
have adopted it, just as they have adopted 
the absurd misnomer of "trust," as applied 
to the great industrial and business combina- 
tions of the day. The tendency of the people 
is to crystallize in a word or phrase some con- 
cept or idea which presents itself to them in an 
undefined and chaotic way, and they choose 
their symbols without much regard for 
scientific accuracy. 

When the American people began to build 
railroads, they at once discovered the utility 
of the corporation, with its capital divided 
into shares; and not long afterv^ards they 
also learned the advantages to be derived 
from the creation of a bonded debt secured by 
mortgage. In substance, I conceive that the 
reason for the introduction of the mortgage 
as distinguished from the English debenture 
was that the construction of a line of railway 
in a growing and expanding country like our 
own was largely an experiment. The capita- 
lists w^hose money v^as to be furnished hesi- 
tated, with the characteristic timidity of 
capital, to put themselves in any other cate- 
gory than that of secured creditors ; while the 
projectors, with the characteristic daring 
of projectors, were grilling to take the risk of 

72 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

the enterprise and to represent their contribu- 
tions of energy, skill and ingenuity of device 
by shares of stock, from which, if successful, 
they would derive generous profits. It was 
then believed by the simple-hearted banker 
and lawyer that a first mortgage on a line of 
railway afforded to the bondholder a security 
bearing some analogy, both as to the nature 
of the lien and the method of its enforcement, 
to the security afforded by mortgages upon 
city lots, or farms, or other classes of real 
property. We have since been instructed by 
"svise and learned jurists that the banker and 
the lawyer were wholly mistaken. They did 
not know the law. As they were bound to 
know it, there is no excuse for their error, 
according to a well-known maxim. This we 
shall see later on when we consider some 
questions affecting the priority of liens. 

From the primordial types of share capital 
and mortgage bonds developed all the bewil- 
dering < creations of second and third mort- 
gages, prior lien mortgages, general mort- 
gages, income mortgages,terminal mortgages, 
consolidated mortgages, collateral trust 
mortgages, extension mortgages, refunding 
mortgages, first and second, cumulative and 
non-cumulative, preferred stocks, voting 
trust certificates — the list grows to stupen- 

73 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

dous proportions, but it is known to the 
investors, wary and unw^ary, of America, of 
England and of the Continent. Naturally, 
with all this efifective machinery, came 
insolvency. At first the procedure was sim- 
plicity itself. The trustee of the mortgage 
went into court, or resorted to the ordinary 
summary power of sale, and foreclosed the 
equity of redemption of the mortgagor. The 
stock, to use an expression more forcible and 
familiar than elegant, was ''wiped out." 
That was the end of it. The unsecured 
creditor retired to his place of business, 
charged the debt to profit and loss account, 
and endeavored to make up his loss by over- 
charging the successor company. The stock- 
holder went into the market to find some 
more bargains, hoping by a lucky stroke to 
** average." But it was not long before there 
came into the minds of stockholder and of 
general creditor a sense of the infinite capacity 
for delay which is afi'orded by our judicial 
system. The road to a decree of sale became 
less smooth and easy. Then, too, it was not 
uncommon that the men who owned largely 
of the mortgage bonds also held largely of the 
shares of stock about to be rendered value- 
less. Moreover, broad and liberal business 
views began to prevail, and it was seen that, 

74 



RAILWAY RSORGANJZATIONS 

as the trouble usually came from the lack of 
cash resources, it would be only just, and 
would also tend to aid the bondholders in 
performing what was often a difficult and 
burdensome task, if unsecured creditors and 
stockholders should be permitted to contrib- 
ute towards the cash requirements of the new 
corporation, and thus effect some salvage. 
Out of all these things, and perhaps others 
which need not be enumerated, grew up the 
modern railway reorganization, often involv- 
ing millions on millions of values, the fortunes 
of the rich, the savings of the poor, the pros- 
perity of thousands of human beings, and 
even the welfare of communities ; to the solu- 
tion of whose problems some of the greatest 
men in politics, in finance, at the bar and on 
the bench have given the most arduous labor, 
the highest forces of their intellects, and in 
some instances their very lives. 

It is not my purpose to consider reorganiza- 
tions wJaich are effected by the consent of all 
the parties in interest, or by a valid voluntary 
sale of the corporate assets to a new com- 
pany. These do not often present legal ques- 
tions of much difficulty. In such cases, as in 
all reorganizations, the persons who assume 
to deal with the subject are bound to con- 
sider the condition of the property, the 

75 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

amount of money needed to render it profit- 
able and productive, and the probable earn- 
ings and income which may reasonably be 
expected from its operation under new con- 
ditions. They must also consider the relative 
values of the existing obligations and stock 
issues, in order to arrive at a fair distribution 
of what may, for brevity, be called the new 
securities. When these practical business 
matters have been arranged and the assent of 
creditors and stockholders obtained, the legal 
process becomes a mere matter of machinery. 
It is the reorganization through the process 
of judicial sale which has the principal inter- 
est for the lawyer. It would be inappropriate 
to present anything in the nature of a treat- 
ise, for the subject is far too comprehensive. 
I propose only to comment briefly on some of 
the legal incidents of such reorganizations. 

In the first instance, where all the creditors 
and the corporation are not acting in unison, 
the aid of the courts must be invoked for the 
' 1 purpose of preventing the dismemberment of 
I the properties, the waste of assets and the 
destruction of values which would result 
from a seizure under various writs and pro- 
cesses at the suit of creditors struggling for 
preference in a race of diligence. 

In the early days of railway foreclosures, 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

as we have observed, the trustees of the 
mortgage were accustomed to institute their 
suit and to make an appHcation for the ap- 
pointment of a receiver under the well-known 
rules applicable to mortgaged property. But 
in course of time it was found that circum- 
stances often rendered it necessary to take 
prompt action in advance of default in pay- 
ment of interest or of principal. 

Here we come to the first striking anomaly 
in the administration of equitable rules as 
applied to railways. Again and again the 
courts have declared that simple contract 
creditors of a corporation who have not re- 
duced their claims to judgment and who have 
obtained no express lien are not entitled to 
ask for the seizure of the debtor's property 
and its application to the payment of their 
debts; and even where the statutes of the 
State permit such a proceeding in the State 
courts the Federal courts will not recognize 
it, because ''the line of demarcation between 
equitable and legal remedies in the Federal 
court cannot be obliterated by state legisla- 
tion" (150 U. S., 378, 379). Yet we find 
that, somehow, within the past decade at 
least, a half dozen great railway systems 
have passed into the possession of receivers 
upon bills filed by complainants without 

77 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

judgments, without express liens — stock- 
holders, bondholders whose bonds were not 
in default, general creditors; and where, as 
in some instances, the assertion of a lien upon 
income has been made, it is palpably an in- 
genious device to bolster up an insufficient 
pleading. 

""Trhe action of the courts in facilitating such 
proceedings for the supposed protection of 
railway properties affords a marked instance 
of the tendency of judges to introduce into 
our jurisprudence new rules and principles 
where it is believed that the interest of the 
public demands a variance from precedents. 
When a railway company is in financial diffi- 
culties and foresees disaster the managers of 
the property are fully aware of the existing 
danger long before open insolvency occurs. 
The scheme of permitting some creditor hav- 
ing a vaHd claim to enter a judgment and 
thereupon, on a creditor's bill, with the as- 
sent of the defendant, to obtain the appoint- 
ment of a receiver of the property, was once 
a favorite one. But this method of procedure 
was found sometimes to be of doubtful effici- 
ency; and in one instance the Federal court 
in Missouri appointed a receiver of the prop- 
erty of the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific 
Railway Company upon a bill in equity filed 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

by the corporation itself against its mortgage 
creditors. This action was afterwards af- 
firmed by the Supreme Court of the United 
States.* The grounds upon which the courts 
assume to proceed in such situations are con- 
cisely stated by Judge Shipman in the case of 
the New York and New England Railroad 
Company (19 Federal Reporter, 633). He 
says: 

" I am of the opinion that when a railroad 
corporation, with its well-known obligations 
to the public, has become entirely insolvent 
and unable to pay its secured debts, unable to 
pay its floating debt and unable to pay the 
sums due its connecting lines, unable to bor- 
row money, and in peril of the breaking up 
and destruction of its business, and confesses 
its inability, although no default has as yet 
taken place upon the securities owned by the 
orator, but a default is imminent and mani- 
fest, a case has arisen where, upon a bill for 
an injunction against attacks upon the mort- 
gaged property, and a receivership to protect 
the property of the corporation against peril, 
a temporary receiver may properly and wisely 
be appointed." 

And in referring to the Wabash case Chief- 
Justice Fuller says : 

• Central Trust Company vs. W., St. L. & P. Rway. 
Co., 29 Federal Reporter, 618-623. 

Railroad Co. vs. Humphreys, 145 U. S., 95, 96, 114. 

79 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

"We have already seen that the theory of 
this bill ^was that an insolvent railroad cor- 
poration may, in the public interest and for 
the benefit of all its various creditors, surren- 
der its property to a court of equity, to be 
preserved and kept in operation until it can 
be disposed of according to the several private 
rights concerned." 

^^Realizing, undoubtedly, that the public na- 
ture of railway property constitutes a slender 
basis for entertaining jurisdiction of a bill filed 
by the corporation itself or by a simple con- 
tract creditor, the Supreme Court has brought 
forward the consideration that while the cor- 
poration might have objected to the jurisdic- 
tion and to the appointment of a receiver, yet 
its express consent waives the defense, and, as 
the administration of the assets of an insol- 
vent corporation is within the functions of a 
court of equity and the parties are before the 
court, the court has power to proceed with 
such administration.* 

A learned and eminent lawyer of Massachu- 
setts, when president of the American Bar 
Association, took occasion some years ago in 
his address to that body to criticise such pro- 
ceedings severely, and contended that they 
were usually collusive, that they were without 

* HoUins vs. Brierfield Coal & Iron Co., 150 U. S., 371, 
380. 

80 



Vx- 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

any proper legal basis, and that they invari- 
ably resulted to the disadvantage of the law- 
ful creditors of the company. While the . , > : ^ ; 
views of Mr. Storey are entitled to great re- ^ ^v a (^>^- '* 
spect, yet I cannot help thinking that his 
judgment was somewhat influenced by an 
unfortunate experience to which he had 
recently been subjected, ^svhere he conceived 
that a serious wrong had been done to his 
cHents through the action of one of our Fed- 
eral courts. After describing a bill of com- 
plaint of the character to which reference 
has been made, he says : 

**In brief, the representatives of the debtor 
ask that the creditors be deprived of that to 
which they are entitled, in order to preserve 
for the debtor property to which confessedly 
it is not entitled. * * * To disguise the 
naked effrontery of this position the bills have 
generally alleged that the public interest will 
suffer from the disintegration of the system, 
but if the public interest did not prevent the 
making of the contracts it should not prevent 
their enforcement, even if it were possible 
under the Constitution for courts to take pri- 
vate rights for any such shadowy public use 
and without any compensation. Practically, 
however, it may be doubted if there is any 
foundation for this claim, which certainly has 
never been established after argument, for no 
opportunity to litigate it has been given." 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

In this statement Mr. Storey seems to have 
gone a little too far. The jurisdiction of the 
courts to take possession of railroads and 
appoint receivers in advance of foreclosure 
proceedings is well established in this country 
by decisions in the several circuits as well as 
in the Supreme Court. Mr. Storey did not, 
perhaps, anticipate the utterance of our high- 
est tribunal which affords a reason for such 
and some other decisions, viz: that "all judi- 
cial proceedings must be adjusted to facts as 
they are" (174 U. S., 682). He overlooked 
the fact that "railroad mortgages area pecu- 
liar class of securities" (100 U. S., 605). He 
did not remember that "foreclosure proceed- 
ings of mortgages covering extensive railroad 
properties are not necessarily conducted with 
the limitations that attend the foreclosure of 
ordinary mortgages" (174 U. S., 682). In 
other words he failed to appreciate the truth 
that in dealing with railways, especially ex- 
tensive ones, the settled rules of law and prac- 
tice may properly be disregarded, and the 
courts are not to be hampered by precedents 
or authorities. Possibly, small and unim- 
portant railways are still to be governed by 
the ordinary rules. I am reminded of a dis- 
tinguished Federal judge who once told me 
that he would decline to entertain jurisdiction 

82 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

of a case where the raihroad was less than one 
hundred miles long. In that instance, how- 
ever, it is only just to say that the remark was 
a playful one, and that it was not intended to 
be preserved for the benefit of posterity. 

But while Mr. Storey is mistaken in deny- 
ing the power of the court to do such acts as 
it may consider to be necessary for the pre- 
servation of a railway, without regard to 
precedent, yet there is much justice in his 
remarks with reference to the selection of 
receivers. It is true that the receivers of the 
property of such corporations should be men 
of the highest character and ability, and as 
impartial as the lot of humanity will permit. 
Yet, it is not easy to establish any general 
rule which will adapt itself to all cases. One 
eminent Federal judge, who has recently re- 
tired from the bench, always declined to 
appoint a receiver who had been directly con- 
nected with the management of the railway, 
and yet there are instances where it is for the 
benefit of creditors as well as of stockholders 
that the receiver should be a man familiar 
with the management of the particular prop- 
erty. The evils of which Mr. Storey com- 
plains are somewhat exaggerated by him. 
To the credit of our Federal judiciary, it must 
be said that instances of improper appoint- 

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ment of receivers are extremely rare. On the 
whole, the course recently adopted by Judge 
Lacombe, in the case of the Third Avenue 
Railroad Company, is doubtless the most 
prudent one, and it is to be hoped that it 
may be followed by judges in all the circuits. 
In that case a temporary appointment only 
was made, and all persons interested in the 
property, whether as creditors or stock- 
holders, were invited to appear on a day 
appointed in the order, with the right to be 
heard on the question whether the receiver- 
ship should be continued, and also as to the 
person who should be receiver. While it 
may be true that the security holders are 
usually scattered and unorganized, yet it 
must be a very extraordinary case v^here a 
sufficient number cannot be brought together, 
under the summons of a court, to prevent the 
appointment of an improper person, or, at all 
events, to obtain the appointment of some 
satisfactory associate receiver. 

The fact that mortgaged lines of railway 
very commonly extend through many States 
and many judicial districts sometimes occa- 
sions serious difficulty and confusion. It is 
manifest that some one court must assume 
control of the litigation and of the property ; 
but the organization of our Federal courts, 

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where these proceedings are usually con- 
ducted, is such that the Circuit Court of one 
district is wholly separate and distinct from . , L<«^\-vrs 

the Circuit Court of any other district. The f---^*^ f^* 
practice of filing a bill called "a principal 
bill" in one district and " ancillary " bills in 
other districts was disapproved and held to 
be irregular and improper by Mr. Justice 
Harlan in a well-considered opinion (39 Fed. 
Rep., 337). Hence came the unseemly conten- 
tions of the several courts in the case of the 
Northern Pacific Railroad, where three or 
four sets of receivers struggled for the posess- 
sion of the property, to the lasting injury of 
the unfortunate bondholders and share- 
holders. It was not until the Justices of the 
Supreme Court, in a somewhat informal and, 
perhaps, a summary fashion, interfered to 
quell this judicial turmoil and controversy, 
that order was evoked out of chaos and the 
scandal swept away. It is clear that either 
judicious legislation should be secured or that 
some controlling decree of the Supreme Court 
should be obtained to prevent a repetition in 
the future of this undignified and inexcusable 
strife of judges for patronage and power. I 
refer to the Northern Pacific case as a strik- 
ing example. There have been other cases, 
and unless some wise action to prevent it 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

shall be taken by Congress or by the court of 
final jurisdiction we shall again and again 
be subjected to similar experiences, which can 
result only in bringing discredit upon our 
courts and disgrace to the administration 
of justice. 

When the railway has passed securely into 
the possession of the court, the prospective 
reorganizers encounter the problems con- 
nected with the debts of the receiver and with 
the attempts of general creditors to obtain a 
preference over the mortgage liens. 
Every one is familiar with the ** receiver's 
Rj,cA-" <^ certificate." So far as it is a mere evidence of 
a^ indebtedness, entitled to payment only out 

of the income of the property, it is undoubt- 
edly harmless, and the authorization of such 
certificates is a legitimate exercise of the 
power of the court in the protection and 
preservation of the trust fund in its hands. 
But usually the court directs that the indebt- 
edness evidenced by the certificates shall con- 
stitute a first lien upon the entire property, 
income and franchises of the corporation, and 
relegates the first mortgagee to a secondary 
position. It has been well said by a wise and 
prudent commentator that this dangerous 
power, unlimited by any statute or constitu- 
tion, by the exercise of which the solemn 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

obligations of the mortgage contract are im- 
paired and a large portion of the mortgage 
security diverted, cannot be sustained upon 
any just principles of legal reasoning. Yet \ 
this power is so well established by authority / 
that its existence is no longer open to ques- | 
tion. The Legislatures of our States, who 
are supposed to be exponents of the people's 
will, must perforce respect contract rights, 
but the Chancellor is under no such obliga- 
tion. 

The attempt is usually made, and some- 
times successfully, to obtain the consent of 
the mortgage creditors to this displacement 
of their security. As in most instances it is 
impracticable to procure the consent of the 
holders of the bonds, it is sought to bind 
them through the act of the trustee of the 
mortgage. 

It has been suggested in essays, mono- 
graphs and addresses on several occasions 
that the trustees of corporate mortgages are 
in a measure indifferent to the obligations of 
their trusts; that their representation of 
bondholders is nominal only, and that they 
are frequently more inclined to accede to the 
wishes of the debtor corporation, by whom 
they were originally appointed, rather than 
to serve the interests of the owners of bonds 

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for whom they are trustees. According to 
my observation, these criticisms are unjust. 
There may be cases where individual trustees 
— and by that term I mean natural persons 
and not trust companies — have allowed 
themselves to be used as the instruments of 
the persons interested adversely to the bond- 
holders, but trust companies generally are 
extremely careful to preserve in every practic- 
able v^ay the rights of the holders of the 
bonds. The difficulties which surround them 
are scarcely appreciated either by the courts 
or by the public. As a rule, the trustees 
occupy solely a trust position, and are not 
owners of the bonds themselves. The security 
holders are scattered, they know little of the 
situation of the property, and they are un- 
known to each other. When the trustee is 
summoned bj^ the court to show cause why 
an issue of receiver's certificates should not be 
authorized, and is told by counsel for the 
petitioner or for the receiver, or frequently by 
the judge himself, that such an issue is neces- 
sary to maintain the integrity of the prop- 
erty, or to put it in safe order and condition, 
or to make repairs which are demanded by 
the public interest, or to complete construc- 
tion work, what is the trustee to do ? Time 
is not afforded to ascertain the wishes of the 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

bondholders, a difficult task at the best 
unless the powerful aid of the court itself is 
invoked to call the bondholders before it. If 
the trustee opposes the petition he is forced 
into a controversy, which is usually dis- 
tasteful to the court, and, moreover, may be 
in the end injurious to the property. If he 
asks the court to defer action until investiga- 
tion may be made, he is told that the matter 
is pressing and must be decided at once. On 
one occasion the trustee was informed by the 
judge that it might object if it chose, but that 
the certificates would be issued notwith- 
standing any such objection. The judge 
acted wisely. He had made up his mind that 
the necessity existed; he was protected by 
the judicial panoply, and he did not attempt to 
avoid responsibility by imposing it upon a 
trustee having no such protection. 

But the most amazing exercise of the power 
of the court in this regard may be found in 
what is known as the Illinois Midland case 
(117 U. S., 434), where the trustee of one of 
the prior mortgages never received any notice 
of the application, and was not a party to 
the suit. The receivership was instituted 
under a judgment creditor's bill, and after- 
wards foreclosure bills were filed which were 
consolidated with the creditor's suit. No 

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order was entered in the foreclosure suits ap- 
pointing the receiver. Eighteen diflferent series 
of receiver's certificates were issued in order 
to pay claims of almost every conceivable 
character. All these certificates were decreed 
to be prior liens upon all the property of the 
company, and it was held that the consent of 
neither the bondholders nor of the trustee 
was necessary, because they knew that the 
road was being operated by the receiver, and 
although the interest on the bonds was in 
default they had not instituted proceedings to 
enforce the mortgage. 

The conclusion cannot be resisted that some 
salutary restrictions should be placed on the 
exercise of this extraordinary power, and re- 
spect for vested contract rights demands that 
such rights should not be destroyed without 
ample investigation and full opportunity to 
be heard on the part of all persons having an 
interest in the fund. It is not difiicult to give 
public notice by advertisement of the inten- 
tion to consider the question of the creation 
of receiver's prior-lien certificates, and to af- 
ford to bondholders, shareholders and general 
creditors an opportunity to present to the 
court all the considerations bearing upon the 
subject. This was the method of procedure 
suggested by Judge Lacombe in the Third 

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Avenue Railroad case, and it is ^worthy of 
imitation. 

A more serious question arises with respect ^ r ~ — ^^ fV3^^ *' ""* 
to the payment, in preference to the mortgage 
bonds, of debts incurred by the mortgagor 
for labor performed and for materials and 
supplies furnished prior to the receivership. 
Here again the Federal courts have estab- 
lished the doctrine that in the exercise of their 
equitable powers they may displace the mort- 
gage lien and apply the funds properly be- 
longing to the mortgagee in order to pay and 
discharge the claims for labor, equipment and 
material, as well as car rentals, and even 
fees of counsel. 

The State courts have been reluctant to go 
to the same extent. In New York, when it 
was sought to provide for the payment of 
labor claims by giving them a preference over 
mortgages — a request seldom, if ever, refused 
by a Federal court — the Court of Appeals said : 

"The argument in its support is that the 
value of the mortgage lien has been enhanced 
by the labor of the workman. It is easy to 
see that under such a plea the lienor might be 
entirely defeated, and the foreclosure of his 
mortgage rendered inoperative and useless. 
Such a result, except upon his consent, the 
courts have no power to sanction" (103 
N. Y.,245). 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

But the public character of railroad corpo- 
rations is again invoked to sanction the sub- 
stitution of what some judge or set of judges 
may think to be for the public benefit, in place 
of that "collection of principles to be found 
in the opinions of sages, or deduced from uni- 
versal and immemorial usage, and receiving 
progressively the sanction of the courts" 
(Kent, Lecture xxi.), which we call ''the 
law." It cannot be denied that much may 
justly be said in favor of the protection of 
laborers, servants and materialmen under 
certain conditions, even at the expense of the 
mortgagee. The argument of Judge Cald- 
well in the Kansas City, W3'^andotte and 
Northwestern case (53 Federal Reporter, 
182)* is certainly a vigorous and forcible 
exposition of his long-established conviction 
that the rights of the holder of a railway 
mortgage bond have priority over no other 
rights except those of stockholders. What- 
ever may be said of his reasoning, which 
seems to be a remarkable medley of good 
sense and nonsense, we are compelled to rec- 
ognize the fact that the Federal courts, after 
a fashion and in a shifting, vague and uncer- 

* Strongly disapproved by Jenkins, J., in Farmers' 
Loan and Trust Co. vs. Northern Pacific R. R. Co., 68 
Fed. Rep., 36. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

tain way, do about what they please in ar- 
ranging the order of payment of railway 
debts. 

The just cause of complaint which we are 
entitled to present to the judges of the courts 
is that no settled rules have been established 
by which we may test the right of a general 
creditor to a preference over the bondholder. 
Judge CaldTzv^ell's rule, that all general 
creditors are entitled to such a preference, has 
the merit of being comprehensive, but it is not 
followed by any other jurist, except possibly 
by Judge Hanford, of the District of Wash- 
ington, and the Supreme Court has done little 
more than to tell us that it will act as the 
particular circumstances of the case seem to 
require. 

One may search the reports from Fosdick 
vs. Schall (99 U. S., 235) to Lackawanna 
Co. vs. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co. (176 
U. S., 298) without finding any definite prin- 
ciple established, unless it be that the court 
possesses the povsrer, whenever it sees fit to 
exercise it, to take from the mortgage creditor 
the income, and even the principal fund be- 
longing to him, for the purpose of applying it 
to the payment of unsecured claims. Let any 
one compare the decision in the Lackav^anna 
case with the case reported immediately before 

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RAILWAY FEORGANIZATIONS 

it (176 U. S., 257) and try to reconcile the 
two decisions and he will be forced to "give 
it up." The Supreme Court says: 

* 'This court has uniformly refrained from lay- 
ing down any rule as absolutely controlling in 
every case involving the right of unsecured 
creditors of a corporation, whose property is 
in the hands of a receiver, to have their de- 
mands paid out of net earnings in preference 
to mortgage creditors" (176 U. S., 285). 

There is even no certain ground presented 
upon which the power is said to rest. In the 
leading case* it is suggested that the income 
upon which the mortgagee was entitled to 
rely was only the net earnings, and that in 
accepting the security he impliedly agreed that 
current debts made in the ordinary course of 
business should be paid from current receipts 
before he should have any claim upon the in- 
come ; and if earnings had in the past been 
used to pay the interest on the bonds, or to 
provide additional equipment, or to make 
lasting and valuable improvements, which 
ought in equity to have been employed to 
keep down debts for labor, supplies and the 
like, it was within the power of the court to 
use the income of the receivership to discharge 
such obligations. But in that case there was 

•Fosdick vs. Schall, 99 U. S., 235. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

not the slightest evidence that any income had 
been diverted either by the company or by the 
receiver, and the question of diversion does 
not appear to have been argued by counsel. * 
It vp-as also suggested that a court of chan- 
cery, when asked by railroad mortgagees to 
appoint a receiver pending foreclosure pro- 
ceedings, might, in the exercise of a sound 
judicial discretion and as a condition of issu- 
ing the necessary order, impose such terms in 
reference to the payment from the income of 
the receivership of outstanding debts and 
labor suppHes, equipment or permanent im- 
provement of the mortgaged property as 
might ** under the circumstances of the par- 
ticular case appear to be reasonable." 

In accordance with this purely obiter re- 
mark, one of our learned Circuit Judges, who 
has gained the distinction of being the self- 
constituted guardian of general creditors, and 
whose denunciation of bondholders has been 
frequently more lurid than wise, adopted the 
custom of making the appointment of a re- 
ceiver conditional upon the payment of all 
unsecured indebtedness in preference to the 
mortgage liens sought to be enforced, al- 
though protesting quite loudly that it was 
not really necessary, because the court had 

• High on Receivers, 370. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

power to apply admiralty rules to instru- 
mentalities of land transportation. 

With respect to this the Supreme Court 
said : 

**Can anything be conceived which more 
thoroughly destroys the sacredness of con- 
tract obligations ? One holding a mortgage 
debt upon a railroad has the same right to 
demand and expect of the court respect for his 
vested and contracted priority as the holder 
of a mortgage on a farm or lot. * * * No 
one is bound to sell to a railroad company or 
to workTor it, and whoever has dealings with 
a company ^vhose property is mortgaged 
must be assumed to have dealt w^ith it on the 
faith of its personal responvSibility and not in 
expectation of subsequently displacing the 
priority of the mortgage liens." * 

Yet the same court which made this declara- 
tion is found nine years afterwards saying : 

** We have held in a series of cases that the 
peculiar character and conditions of railroad 
property not only justify, but compel, a court 
entertaining foreclosure proceedings to give to 
certain limited unsecured claims a priority 
over the debts secured by the mortgage. It 
is needless to refer to the many cases in which 
this doctrine has been affirmed. It may be 
and has often been said that this rule implies 
somewhat of a departure from the apparent 

*Kneeland vs. American Loan and Trust Co., 136 
U. S., 89, page 97. 

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priority of right secured by a contract obliga- 
tion duly made and duly recorded, and yet 
this court, recognizing that a railroad is not 
simply private property, but also an instru- 
ment of public service, has ruled that the 
character of its business and the public obli- 
gations which it assumes justify a limited dis- 
placement of contract and recorded liens in 
behalf of temporary and unsecured creditors. 
These conclusions, while they to a certain ex- 
tent ignored the positive promises of contract 
and recorded obligations, were enforced in 
obedience to equitable and public considera- 
tions."* 

It will be observed how much stress is laid 
upon the fact that the unsecured claims and 
the displacement of the contract rights are 
'^ limited. ^^ But what limit has the court 
ever placed upon the exercise of its po^wer in 
this behalf? There have been cases where the 
court has refused to give a preference to the 
unsecured claim, but this has not been because 
of any particular rule established by the 
court. ^ **The decision in each case has been 
more or less controlled by its special facts" 
(176 U. S., 315). No counsel may, with any 
confidence, advise a client ^whether or not his 
demand comes within the class which the 
court will recognize as entitled to priority. 
No counsel may, with any confidence, advise 

•174 U. S., 682. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

a reorganization committee as to what 
moneys they will be required to furnish in 
order to satisfy preferential claims. This 
condition of doubt and uncertainty should be 
removed. Some fairly comprehensive rule 
should be established, and it should be fol- 
lowed in all the Circuits. It may be that '* no 
fixed and inflexible rule can be laid down for 
the government of the courts in all cases'* 
(99 U. S., 254), but no one asks for such a 
rule. The fact that one cannot do a thing 
perfectly does not prevent one from doing it 
as well as he can. When we are told that 
there can be no rw7e, we are told in substance 
that there can be no law. 

Where a body so learned and august as the 
Supreme Court of the United States has been 
unable or unwilling to formulate any method 
by which to test the right of an unsecured 
creditor to a preference over a lien creditor, it 
would be presumptuous on the part of a mere 
practicing attorney, laboring under the dis- 
advantage of being a seeker after truth with- 
out the power of declaring effectively what is 
the truth, to suggest what such a method 
should be. But at all events it should pre- 
vent a manufacturer of steel rails who was 
or should have been fully informed respecting 
the mortgage debts of a railway company, 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

and who sold to that company when it was 
trembling on the verge of insolvency, from 
exacting payment in full out of the trifling 
fund to which the hapless widow or executor 
or trustee who had innocently invested money 
in the mortgage bonds is obliged to resort in 
order to save a small fraction of the invest- 
ment. It should recognize the fact that one 
who lends money, the product of labor, may 
have some slight equitable right to demand 
that the proceeds of his security shall be ap- 
plied to his use and not diverted to that of 
another who was willing to sell at a profit 
supplies — no more a product of labor than 
the money loaned — or to do work, without 
taking any protective security, the debtor 
being wholly -without credit in the financial 
world. It should discriminate between cases 
where the work performed or the materials 
famished were manifestly necessary for the 
safety of the public, and cases where there 
was no real and substantial emergency . There 
is no sound reason for putting a premium 
upon heedlessness, carelessness and indiffer- 
ence. 

The Legislatures of many of the States have, 
it is true, devised in their wisdom statutes in- 
tended to deal with the problem, but it can- 
not be said that they have exhibited any 

99 



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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

broad, comprehensive or intelligent judgment 
in framing these laws. There is no uniformity 
about them. The different States are unable 
to agree upon the method of adjusting the 
respective rights of creditors. With the courts 
confessing inability ]to enunciate any principle 
and the Legislatures laboring in confusion, we 
are confronted with a jumble on the one hand 
and a blank on the other. The situation is 
by no means creditable to the science of juris- 
prudence. 

After the reorganizers have given up the 
task of guessing at what the courts will 
decide upon the question of prior and pre- 
ferential claims and have indulged in the 
delusive hope that there may be a few gen- 
eral creditors who are not to be paid in 
advance of " secured " creditors, they begin to 
estimate the amount needed to rehabilitate 
the property and to endeavor to ascertain 
with reasonable certainty the true value of 
the existing bonds and shares of stock in 
order to give to their owners a fair propor- 
tion of the new securities. Money must be 
supplied and who is to supplj^ it ? 

Naturally, the owners of the stock of the 
insolvent company are expected to make some 
contribution of money as a condition of 
receiving an interest in the reorganized 

100 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

company. It is customary to refer to this 
contribution as an ** assessment," but the 
term is neither accurate nor descriptive. The 
stockholder merely buys an amount of the 
new securities proportionate to his holdings 
of stock. This apparently innocent method 
of procedure has been subjected of late to 
some judicial criticism, although it is doubtful 
whether the court intended to condemn the 
mere admission of the stockholder and ex- 
clusion of the general creditor in the absence -> A. « Sc^^* 
of fraud or collusion.* The decision has been **^^ 



the cause of grave uncertainty in the minds 
of the profession. 

It is not disputed that bondholders may 
lawfully agree with other bondholders to 
purchase the mortgaged property at the fore- 
closure sale, and deal with it as the owners 
after they have acquired the title. It is not 
disputed that the stockholders may agree 
with other stockholders to bid at the sale, 
and if they succeed in their efforts they may 
'* reorganize" without objection. The gen- 
eral creditors may also combine, and if they 
are able to outbid their competitors, they 
too may ** reorganize " in their own way. 

It would seem, as well as may be ascer- 
tained from the opinion of the court in the 

*The "Monon" Case, 174 U. S., 682. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

"Monon" case, that if the bondholders and 
the stockholders come to any understanding 
before the sale, a wrong is perpetrated upon 
the excluded general creditor. That much 
injured person has been in some way de- 
frauded. It is true that he has not been 
deprived of any contract right. He has not 
been excluded from the right to attend the 
sale and bid upon the property an amount 
sufficient to pay his claims. But, neverthe- 
less, he has been defrauded because railway 
properties are peculiar, because it is not easy 
for general creditors to combine together, 
because railways are usually bought by the 
parties in interest, and because when bond- 
holder and stockholder join it is impracticable 
to compete with them. 

The proposition thus asserted, although in 
a qualified way, by the Supreme Court, does 
not appear to be sustained by any well-con- 
sidered authority, and it certainly tends to 
unsettle v^hat was formerly supposed to be 
the law. If maintained to its full extent it 
will render it exceedingly difficult hereafter to 
reorganize any railroad property in an em- 
barrassed condition. 

A fraudulent conspiracy between bondhold- 
ers and stockholders to bring about a default 
in the payment of the interest on the bonded 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

debt, a foreclosure of the mortgage and a 
subsequent recapitalization in which the stock- 
holders may obtain an interest to the exclu- 
sion of unsecured creditors, might justly re- 
ceiYC judicial condemnation (R. R. Co. vs. 
Howard, 7 Wallace, 392). But where the 
company has become insolvent, where the 
mortgagees have the right to foreclose and 
have exercised that right, and even where the 
defendant corporation has expedited and fa- 
cilitated the mortgagee in the assertion of 
that right, there should not be any imputa- 
tion of fraud or impropriety in the enforce- 
ment of the security and the vesting of ab- 
solute title in the purchaser at the foreclosure 
sale, not^thstanding the fact that the mo- 
tives and intention of the parties may have 
been to effect a reorganization in which the 
stockholders of the debtor company should 
receive a benefit (Dickerman, Trustee, vs. The 
Northern Trust Company, 176 U. S., 193). 

An agreement between creditors of an in- 
solvent to buy in the insolvent's property at 
a judicial sale and then to give to the insol- 
vent himself, or to set apart for his benefit, an 
interest in the property purchased is neither 
illegal nor void as contrary to public policy. * 

• Bame vs. Drew, 4> Denio, 287 ; Wicker vs. Hoppock, 
6 Wallace, 94-98 ; Shoemaker vs. Katz, 74 Wis., 374. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

Nor is there anything illegal in an agreement, 
made in good faith by the bondholders of an 
insolvent railroad to buy in its property at a 
foreclosure sale and then to give to the stock- 
holders of the former company an interest in 
its property, either for a consideration or 
without consideration. 

Under the authorities such an agreement 
does not operate to cause any restraint in 
bidding. A creditor and his debtor may con- 
tract that at public sale, where all are per- 
mitted to compete, the creditor shall buy the 
property and afterwards apply a part of it to 
the debtor's benefit. There is nothing illegal 
or invalid in such a contract. It does not 
operate to depress the property or to cause it 
to be sold for less than its value. It is only a 
lawful means of protecting the property from 
sacrifice. * 

It is not easy to see why, if a part of the 
whole number of creditors may join in buy- 
ing the debtor's property at a judicial sale, 
and then give to the debtor a share in the 
estate, they may not agree in advance so to 
do. "How does an antecedent agreement 
to do a perfectly lawful act render it fraudu- 

•Penn. Transportation Co.'s Appeal, 101 Penn. St. 
576; Central Trust Co. vs. U. S. Rolling Stock Co., 56 
Fed. Rep., 5 ; Paton vs. R. R. Co., 85 Fed. Rep., 838. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

lent?" asks the Supreme Court of Pennsyl- 
vania.* The right to participate in the 
benefit of the reorganization comes to stock- 
holders not by virtue of their right as holders 
of stock, but purely from the grace of the 
prior lien creditors, who have, in the absence 
of fraud, the power to give to whom 
they please an interest in the purchased 
property.! 

These considerations were not presented to 
the Supreme Court upon the argument of the 
case to which reference has been made, because 
it was not supposed that they were pertinent 
to any question arising upon the record in the 
cause. It is to be hoped that when, if ever, 
the precise point is brought again before that 
court the subject will receive a thorough re- 
examination in the light of all the precedents 
and with facts instead of conjectures, upon 
which a definite decision may be based. As it 
stands now, it is not exaggeration to say 
that the Supreme Court has simply placed a 
dangerous weapon in the hands of those 
guerillas who hang about the outskirts of 
reorganizations and endeavor to levy tribute 

•Kurtz vs. R. R. Co., 187 Penn. St., 59. 

tDow vs. Iowa Central Ry. Co., 144 N. Y., 426-430 ; 
Ferguson vs. Ann Arbor Ry. Co., 17 N. Y. App. Div., 336. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

as a condition of abating the nuisance of 
their presence. * 

Among those who are not well acquainted 
with the subject, there is an impression that 
the men who perform the work of reorganiz- 
ing railway corporations are more con- 
cerned about their own profits than they are 
with regard to the interests of the bondhold- 
ers and stockholders. The impression is, 
however, without foundation. In most in- 
stances the members of the committees are 
fully mindful of the obligations of their trust. 
The fact is that honesty and good faith usu- 
ally prevail among those men who assume 
the task, often inadequately rewarded, of re- 
habilitating railroad properties. The great 
' ^ reorganizers ' ' of Wall Street are in truth and 
in fact honest and straightforward men. 
They are paid, of course, for their labor and 
trouble ; no one could reasonably expect them 
to devote their time, their energies, their skill, 
and their acquaintance w^ith the laws of busi- 
ness, to the benefit of others without receiv- 
ing the same just compensation which pro- 
fessional men receive for similar services. But 

* Since this was written Mr. Justice Woods has, in a 
carefully considered opinion, based upon the facts of the 
" Monon " case as developed upon the hearing before the 
Master, reaffirmed the validity of the proceedings. 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

there are others who imitate the methods of 
the honorable bankers, who ape their style, 
who rely upon the gulHbility of the innocent 
investor, and these men should be closely ob- 
served, and their schemes should be carefully 
scrutinized. In this field, as in every field, the 
character of the leaders and promoters de- 
serves careful consideration. Those who are 
entitled to trust and confidence should receive 
it ; but, after all, it is a matter of trust and 
confidence, and the public must place that 
confidence wisely or suffer the consequences of 
error and mistake. 

The great evil which seems to me to be the 
one most deserving of condemnation in con- 
nection with railways, as well as with indus- 
trial and other corporations, is that of over- 
capitalization. Many thoughtful men regard 
with alarm the suppression of competition 
which they say comes from the multiplication 
of great companies. I cannot share in their 
apprehensions. Modem business had its 
beginnings in the monopolies granted to such 
corporations as the East India Company. 
Whatever makes the necessities of life, or the 
conveniences of life, cheaper and easier to 
obtain, enures to the benefit of the community. 
The outcry against system, administrative 
economy and judicious restriction of expendi- 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

ture is not unlike the unreasoning clamor 
against the introduction of machinery in our 
manufactures and upon our farms. Mankind 
has found all these labor-saving devices a 
source of benefit to the world, a potent factor 
in the development of civilization. The harm 
which is done to men by corporations does 
not arise from the mere existence of such com- 
binations, nor from their practical operation 
as unified forces. 

While temporary inconvenience may be 
caused in some instances by the fact that 
only a few men may be required to do the 
work which many men were formerly engaged 
to do, yet the^saving of labor and the cutting 
off of unnecessary industry must, by all the 
laws of political economy, contribute to in- 
crease the prosperity of the world at large. 
The mischief is done by the unv^ise expansion 
of the evidences of debt and of the evidences 
of interest in the corporate properties. It 
leads to extortion, to speculation and to ulti- 
mate ruin. Let our legislators frame laws 
not to discourage legitimate combinations, 
but to restrict their issues of stocks and of 
obligations within reasonable bounds. They 
have made attempts to do so, but generally 
in a feeble and ineflfective way, because, I fear, 
they have often striven to appear to give 

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protection to the public without any real or 
sincere intention to accomplish that result. 
Let our reorganizers recognize the fact that 
the multiplication of "securities" only leads 
to renewed insolvency and to the ruin of in- 
vestors. In recent years they have come to 
appreciate this truth ; and I am glad to say 
that I believe the day has gone by when it is 
thought that the way to rehabilitate a cor- 
porate property is to increase the burdens 
upon it. It seems to be probable that the 
time will soon come, if it has not come 
already, when railway reorganizations will 
be few and far between, and the many pages 
of treatises and reports devoted to these 
topics which now fill our libraries to re- 
pletion may soon become as obsolete as those 
of the quaint old volumes which treat of fines 
and recoveries, of casual ejectors, and of trials 
by w^ager of battle. 

There are many other features of railway 
reorganization which tempt one to wander 
further over the broad field of discussion, but 
the temptation, like most other temptations, 
must be resisted. A young lawyer in Florida 
once wrote to me asking what books he 
should read in order to become familiar with 
what he called "corporation law." I told 
him that he had better read them all. But 

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after mature reflection I am satisfied that, so 
far as reorganization is concerned, the read- 
ing of books and the study of cases is of 
minor importance as compared with a thor- 
ough acquaintance with the methods and the 
machinery of what is known as "finance." 
You will not find, between those covers of that 
underdone pie-crust color which seems to be 
sacred to the law, so much of value as you 
will find in the book of human nature, which 
is open to all, but whose secrets are revealed 
more fully to the man who has been trained 
in the school of experience than to one who 
merely reads as he runs. Those who give 
their time and their thoughts to the work of 
readjustment of corporate interests learn that 
they are most often sailing on an uncharted 
sea. Precedent vanishes before the icono- 
clasm of practical judgment. That which is 
supposed to be firmly established by a long 
line of judicial utterances is soon discovered 
to be inappHcable to the state of facts pre- 
sented when the railway is brought into the 
forum where the judges control. We can only 
conjecture what the courts may think of our 
case. We can only satisfy ourselves fairly 
that what we are aiming to accomplish is 
just and reasonable. We may, however, rest 
assured that in the fight which has been 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

waged so long and persistently between busi- 
ness necessities and statutory law and the 
decisions of judges the contest w^ill,inthelong 
run, be decided in favor of *' business" as it 
has always been decided in the past. Until 
we shall possess the blessings of communism, 
until property rights shall have become the 
plaything of popular prejudices, until the re- 
wards of industry and labor shall have been 
made to be of no value, we may be certain 
that the common sense and the integrity of 
our courts will, in spite of occasional aberra- 
tions due to fortuitous circumstances, render 
substantial justice to all and give to each and 
every one that to which he is entitled as a 
citizen of a country whose government is 
constitutional and under whose laws the rich 
man is entitled, in theory at least, to the same 
rights as those which are accorded to the 
poor. 

I fear that I have already trespassed too 
long upon your patience, yet I cannot close 
without saying a few words about some 
things which pertain to our profession. 

It is to be lamented that the tendency of 
the day is to commercialize, if I may coin that 
term, the noble science of the law. In our 
great cities especially w^e find the practice of 
law largely degenerating into a sort of trade, 

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where the influence of the almighty dollar 
appears to dominate the bar rather than the 
spirit of those lofty ideals which animated 
the great lawyers of past generations. We 
find, for example, men persistently violating 
our long-established canons by a reprehen- 
sible method of self-advertisement. 

Yet, perhaps it is in accord with the spirit 
of the day. In these times the keenness of 
competition is felt in every branch of trade, 
of commerce and of intellectual labor. As 
the complexity of civilization increases, as 
its manifold forces are developed further and 
further, the struggle for existence becomes 
more and more intense, and it goes on at the 
bar as well as in all the varied pursuits of 
life. Yet I am rejoiced to say, for the credit 
of our fraternity, that many of the old habits 
and tendencies which were once a reproach 
to the bar have disappeared as completely 
as the Court of Exchequer and the ancient 
order of Sergeants at Law. It may have been 
partially true fifty years ago, as Dickens, with 
that exaggerated emphasis for which he is 
noted, has said, ''that the one great principle 
of the English law was to make business for 
itself;" and upon that assertion he built up 
the formidable indictment against chancery 
and chancery practice which you will find in 

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the pages of Bleak House. But such an 
indictment Tvould to-day be thrown out by 
any grand jury of the vicinage. The ** mak- 
ing of business" by the promotion of Htiga- 
tion, the multipHcation of papers and pro- 
ceedings, the prosecution of frivolous appeals, 
belongs, if it belongs to any, to the very dregs 
of the profession, who bear the same relation 
to the bar which the cowardly deserter bears 
to the tried and faithful soldier. 

The popular idea about the lawyer is that 
his great, and, indeed, his principal function 
is in the trial of causes before courts and 
juries. It is true that this is an important 
branch of the profession ; that it affords the 
most conspicuous field for the exercise of the 
highest powers of the intellect — the acute- 
ness, the mental grasp, the mastery of men, 
the clear and convincing eloquence v^hich go 
to make up the great advocate ; and notwith- 
standing the manifold changes in the prevail- 
ing methods of thought and action \srhich 
have caused many to believe that the days of 
the great speakers have passed away, and 
that the reign of King Orator has given place 
to the reign of King Editor, there are to-day, 
in Maryland and in New York, advocates, 
whose names will readily occur to you, as 
persuasive as Sir James Scarlett, as powerful 

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as Daniel Webster, and as eloquent as that 
elder Choate, of Massachusetts, whose tradi- 
tion is already dimmed by the lustre of our 
honored representative at the Court of St. 
James^ Still, very often, one is tempted to 
say of some of these forensic displays which 
so gladden the souls of the newspaper report- 
ers what Sidney Bartlett, of Boston, said of 
one of Roscoe Conkling's turgid and inflated 
speeches, paraphrasing the famous criticism 
on the Charge of the Light Brigade at Bala- 
klava, **It is magnificent, but it is not law^ 
After all, the trial and test of the useful law- 
yer comes not so much in the glare of the 
forum as in the daily work of conference and 
counsel in the quiet of the consultation room. 
It is there that the puzzles of life are presented 
and studied and solved. It is there that the 
terms and provisions are settled of the con- 
tract which is to make or mar a fortune. It 
is there that are thought out the moves in the 
great game of chess, which mortals are al- 
ways playing. It is there that the plans are 
devised, considered and adopted upon which 
the battle is to be fought, the campaign con- 
ducted. The man of the court room may be 
— indeed, he is — the man of power and the 
man who draws to himself the attention, the 
admiration and the applause of the public; 

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RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

but the work which tells, the work which en- 
dures, is the work of the office, the library 
and the study. 

I have no doubt that all of us at times have 
deplored the disposition on the part of men 
generally to be humorous and sarcastic at the 
expense of members of what are called **the 
learned professions." I have often thought 
seriously of this tendency to jest at the men 
who are the trusted advisers of their fellow- 
men with regard to their business, their health 
and their religion. As the accomplished editor 
and author, whose loss we all lament, the 
late Irving Browne, remarked, in his book 
on Lawyers and Literature : "To call a 
clergyman a hypocrite, a physician a murder- 
er, and a lawyer a liar has long been one of 
the favorite amusements of a numerically 
considerable part of mankind." You find the 
mechanic who cannot comprehend how a man 
can be of use unless he toils with his hands, 
the merchant who does not scruple to get^the 
better of a customer in the barter and trade 
w^hich make up his life, and the stockbroker 
who derives his princely revenues from a pur- 
suit which some people perhaps rather harshly 
compare with one against which our police 
regulations are extremely rigorous, all dis- 
posed to fling their sneer against the man 

115 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

who they say will espouse any cause if he is 
paid to do it, and impoverishes his clients in 
his insatiate greed for what they term "fat 
fees." 

But these men, I have observed, are devot- 
edly trustful towards their own particular 
legal advisers, just as they are towards the 
doctor who attends to their precious health 
and towards the minister who looks after the 
welfare of their immortal souls. So I am 
sure that it is a mistake for us to resent their 
witticisms upon us. We know that, in spite 
of the caustic comments of the lay brother- 
hood, they must have us, and they demon- 
strate our value by choosing for their rulers 
and their legislators the men of the law. I 
venture to say that, wherever you find the 
forces of civilization at their highest, wher- 
ever you find freedom, sound government, 
true manhood triumphant, you will find the 
lawyers predominant. 

There is a question whether the duty of the 
lawyer demands that he should take an act- 
ive part in politics. I think that the dignity 
and influence of the bar have invariably suf- 
fered while individuals may have reaped ad- 
vantage from engaging in the strife and com- 
petition of political life, and at the same time 
I cannot deny that the man who devotes his 

116 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

life to the study of the rules which lie at the 
foundation of the social organism, ought, in 
all reason, and in the discharge of his obliga- 
tions towards his country, to take his share 
of the burdens and responsibilities of govern- 
ment. If the lawyer feels that the duty he 
owes to the commonwealth requires him to 
sacrifice his ease, his comfort and his profit to 
the gods of politics, he must remember that 
he must have principles of his ow^n and a 
sense of right and ^wrong for his guidance. 
He need not manufacture for himself a new- 
set of political opinions ; he need not stand 
aloof from party organizations as one spe- 
cially conscientious or pre-eminently honest ; 
but he should attach himself to no party 
which is wrong in essential things or which 
stands for principles ^which his conscience 
cannot approve. Giving little heed to popu- 
lar clamor, he should always remember that 
whatever may be the present current of pub- 
lic opinion, it will eventually hold him respon- 
sible for his own acts. 

My brothers, in the every-day work which 
you and I have to perform, it is the adapting 
of principles to the facts of our case which is 
the task we are compelled to execute. We 
come in contact with the events, the incidents, 
the complicated situations of life. It is not 

117 



RAILWAY REORGANIZATIONS 

what the theoretical rule is, but the fitting of 
that rule to our client's case, which affords 
the principal problem for our solution. The 
multiform manifestations of the life of the 
times present to us the shifting surface upon 
which we must engrave our lines and our in- 
scriptions. We cannot afford to rest with 
the knowledge which we have gained in the 
study, but we must add the experience which 
we acquire in the workshop. In the words of 
a great lawyer, ^'Unless, like the pious and 
fanciful enthusiast in Old Mortalitjy we oc- 
casionally deepen the letters of the inscrip- 
tion, they will soon be overgrown with moss 
and lichen, wear away by exposure, and leave 
not a trace behind of what was designed to 
be engraved for a perpetual remembrance." 
Haste and heedlessness will not bring fame or 
usefulness. One night in the blast furnace 
will make mountains of slag, but pearls grow 
and diamonds crystallize after long years — 
years which often seem slow and tedious, but 
which lead to the crowning glory of pure and 
perfected wisdom. 

I am loath to close. What Lincoln called 
**the mystic chords of memory," stretching 
back to the days of youth and of ambition, 
vibrate with peculiar melody. I feel that it 
would be a glorious thing to begin over again 

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the lawyer's life in the light of the experience 
which has come to all of us who are of my 
own years. What could we not accomplish ? 
How faithfully would we pay the debt we 
owe to our profession ! We have realized that 
the law is no "lawless science," no ** myriad 
of precedent," no "wilderness of single in- 
stances," but the perfection of reason, the last 
result of human wisdom, a structure built 
upon the broad foundations of principle. May 
we always be her worthy exponents, and may 
we demonstrate to mankind that "the seat 
of the law is the bosom of God ; her voice the 
harmony of the world." 

^3 ■ I. •eji- 



119 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

IVT OT long ago I became the possessor of a 
^ considerable number of autographic relics 
of William Harrison Ainsworth, including a 
memorandum book and a manuscript volume 
containing an account of his travels in Italy 
in 1830, dedicated to his wife, with a poem ; 
some letters from George Cruikshank to him ; 
thirty-six pages of the draft of his most 
famous novel, "Jack Sheppard;" and more 
than two hundred of his own holograph let- 
ters. The collection is full of interest to those 
who retain a recollection of one who in his 
day enjoyed a wide popularity as a literary 
man and especially as a novelist. Critics, re- 
viewers, students of literature, and readers 
exceptionally well informed, are usually in- 
clined to resent the assertion with respect to 
any writer once eminent, that he is substan- 

123 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

tially forgotten. It is safe however to say 
that if we regard the millions in this country 
whose literary pabulum is composed chiefly of 
works of fiction or occasionally of biogra- 
phy and history of the Hghter sort, as the 
reading public of America, the name of Ains- 
worth is at this day by no means familiar in 
the United States. There are, of course, many 
book-owners who keep his "Works'* upon 
their shelves and know the backs of the 
volumes ; and some of the omnivorous have 
doubtless read* 'Jack Sheppard,*' "Crichton," 
and perhaps "Rookwood." Yet thousands 
who are well acquainted with their Scott, 
their Dickens, and their Thackeray, would be 
sorely puzzled if they were asked to tell us 
who Ainsworth was, and exactly when he 
lived, or to give a synopsis of the plot of a 
single one of his numerous stories — and he has 
been dead only a little over twenty years. 
Nor is the indifference to him limited to gen- 
eral readers or to America. AUibone gives 
him but fourteen lines of biography, mostly 
bitter censure, with a few words of qualified 
praise for such historical tales as ** St. Paul's" 
and "The Tower." Chambers' Encyclopaedia 
of English Literature begrudges him twenty- 
nine lines of depreciative comment, conceding 
to him dramatic art and power, but denying 

124 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

to him "originality or felicity of humor or 
character." He is not even mentioned in Mr. 
Edmund Gosse's Modem English Literature, 
nor does Taine condescend to give his name. 
Yet there was a time when he was esteemed 
to be a worthy rival of Charles Dickens, and 
when in the eyes of the critics and of the pub- 
lic he far outshone Edward Lytton Bulwer. 

In a note to the sketch in the Dictionary 
of National Biograpby^ Mr. Axon says that 
** no biography of Ains worth has appeared or 
is likely to be published." The fact is correctly 
stated, but the prediction may not be fulfilled. 
A devoted admirer of Ainsworth is now en- 
gaged in the preparation of a biography, 
and he tells me that he has been aided by my 
autographic collection. I do not give his 
name, for he probably prefers to make the an- 
nouncement at his own.time and in his own 
way. The only pubHshed records of Ains- 
worth*sHfe which have come to my knowledge 
are, a brief memoir by Laman Blanchard, 
which appeared in the Mirror in 1842 and was 
reproduced in later editions of " Rookwood ; " 
a chapter in Madden' s Life of Lady Blessing- 
ton ; a sketch by James Crossley contributed 
to the Routledge edition of the Ballads in 
1855 ; an account of him by William Bates, 
accompanjring a semi-caricature portrait in 

125 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

the Maclise Portrait Gallery ; and the article 
of Mr. Axon to which I have referred — an 
article as just and as comprehensive as are 
most of those which appear in the great 
Dictionary. 

n. 

Ainsworth was born in Manchester on Feb- 
ruary 4th, 1805. His family was ** respectable" 
in the English sense, for his grandfather on 
his mother's side was a clergyman and his 
father a prosperous solicitor. It was from 
the mother that he inherited in 1842 some 
"landed property," t« use another distinct- 
ively English phrase, and it is amusing to ob- 
serve the pride of Madden when he boasts 
that Ainsworth's name appears in Burke's 
Landed Gentry, He attended the Free Gram- 
mar School in Manchester, where it is said 
that he was proficient in Latin and Greek, 
and as he was expected to succeed to his 
father's practice, he became an articled clerk 
in the office of Mr. Alexander Kay, at the 
age of sixteen. He was a handsome boy, full 
of ambition, but his ambition did not lead 
him in the dull and dusty paths which solici- 
tors tread. He had already written a drama, 
for private production, which was printed in 
Arliss's Magazine y and a number of sketches, 

126 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

translations and minor papers for a serial 
called The Manchester Iris^ and he subse- 
quently conducted a periodical styled The 
Boeotian^ which had a short existence of six 
numbers. Before he was nineteen he was a 
regular contributor to the London Maga- 
zine and the Edinburgh Magazine. Some 
of these youthful efforts were afterwards 
collected in " December Tales " (1823) which 
contained also papers written by others ; the 
** Works of Cheviot Tichbourne" (London, 
1822, Manchester, 1823) ; and *' A Summer 
Evening Tale" (1825). The ** Tichbourne" 
book of verses (the name is spelled in divers 
ways by the several authorities) was dedi- 
cated to Lamb. The author was a devoted 
admirer of Elia, and as early as 1822 Lamb 
had lent him a copy of Cyril Toumeur's play 
or plays, and on May 7, 1822, Lamb wrote to 
him referring to the book and saying, among 
other things, *'I have read your poetry with 
pleasure. The tales are pretty and prettily 
told. It is only sometimes a little careless, I 
mean as to redundancy." The letter men- 
tions the proposed dedication deprecatingly 
and modestly.* 

•This letter seems to have been first printed by William 
Carew Hazlitt in The Lambs (London, 1897) , pp. 195- 
196. 

127 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

Talfourd, Canon Ainger and Fitzgerald in 
their collections give two other letters, writ- 
ten respectively on December 9 and December 
29, 1823, one thanking Ainsworth for "books 
and compliments," and the other giving 
Lamb-like excuses for not leaving beloved 
London to pay a visit to Manchester.* It was 
something of an honor for a lad of seventeen 
to receive the praise of Charles Lamb, who 
appears to have discovered one of his young 
correspondent's besetting sins — redundancy. 
But it may not have meant much, for in those 
days they exchanged compliments more pro- 
fusely than is customary at the present time. 

All these excursions in the field of authorship 
were fatal to the grave study of the law, for 
which he had no taste, and although when his 
father died in 1824 he went to London to 
finish his term with Mr. Jacob Phillips of the 
Inner Temple, it was a foregone conclusion 
that, whatever his career might be, it would 
not be that of a solicitor. About 1826, one 
John Ebers, a publisher in Bond Street and 
also manager of the Opera House, brought out 
a novel called "Sir John Chiverton," which 
received the favor of Sir Walter Scott, who 
said of it in his diary (October 17, 1826) that 
he had read it with interest, and that it was 

* See Temple Bar Edition, iii, 51-52. 

128 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

"a clever book/' at the same time asserting 
that he himself was the originator of the style 
in which it was written. For many years it 
was supposed that Ainsworth was its sole 
author, but it was claimed later by Mr. John 
Partington Aston, a lawyer, who had been a 
fellow-clerk of Ainsworth's in Mr. Kay's office, 
and the book was probably the result of 
collaboration. The dedicatory verses are sup- 
posed to have been addressed to Anne Frances 
Ebers, John Ebers' daughter, whom Ains- 
worth married on October 11, 1826. Soon 
afterwards he seems to have been occupied in 
editing one of those absurd " Annuals " so com- 
mon in those days, for we find Tom Moore re- 
cording in his journal in 1827, that he had been 
asked to edit the Forget-Me-Not to begin with 
the second number, " as the present editor is 
Mr. Ainsworth (I think), the son-in-law of 
Ebers." The compensation offered to Moore 
was £500, which indicates that such work was 
paid for liberally, but it is not likely that 
Ainsworth received as much. A year or so 
after the marriage — within a year in fact — 
he followed his father-in-law's advice and be- 
came himself a publisher and a book-seller ; 
but at the end of eighteen months he decided 
to abandon the business. 
If we may judge by one of the letters in 

129 



WILLIAM HjlRRISON AINSWORTH 

my collection, it is not surprising that he was 
not overwhelmingly successful. He writes to 
Thomas Hill for a notice in the Chronicle of a 
book the copyright of which he had recently 
purchased, adding, ** the work is really a most 
scientific one — indeed the only distinct treatise 
on Confectionery extant." Perhaps this was 
the work of Ude,the cook, whose publisher he 
was; but he also ''brought out "Lady Caro- 
line Norton as an author, of whom he writes 
to Charles Oilier, in his graceful, rather lady- 
like chirography : 

"Is it not possible [to] get me a short 
notice of the enclosed into the new Monthly ? 
By so doing you will infinitely oblige one of 
the most beautiful women in the world — the 
Hon. Mrs. Norton, the grand-daughter of 
Richard Brinsley Sheridan." 

It was for an annual issued by him that Sir 
Walter Scott wrote the "Bonnets of Bonnie 
Dundee," and the story is told by Mr. Axon 
that Sir Walter received twenty guineas for 
it, but laughingly handed them over to the 
little daughter of Lockhart, at whose house 
he and Ainsworth met. He wrote some frag- 
mentary and miscellaneous prose and verse, 
not of much importance, and in 1830 he set 
out for Italy. The manuscript note books 
which lie before me, the paper foxed and the 

130 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

ink faded, comprise a diary of the Italian part 
of the journey. I have toiled over the one 
hundred and sixty-eight pages, not always 
easily decipherable, but have found Httle 
which exceeds in value the ordinary guide-book 
of our own time. It was, we must remember, 
written only for his wife — whom he consider- 
ately left at home — and the dedicatory poem 
to her, consisting of fifty-eight unrhymed lines, 
written in Venice in September, 1830, is quite 
as commonplace as might be expected from 
a man of twenty-five, with Httle poetic inspira- 
tion but endowed with much verbal fluency, 
who was not writing for publication. 

m. 

Soon after his return from the Continent, 
Ainsworth began the work from which he was 
to derive his chief title to fame — the compos- 
ing of novels. It has been said that he was 
inspired by Mrs. Radcliffe, whose gloomy mys- 
teries, weird scenes, and supernatural machin- 
ery once made her a favorite with fiction- 
lovers, and that he sought to adapt old legends 
to English soil. Others have ascribed his im- 
pulse to the influence of the French dramatic 
romancers, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, and Al- 
exander Dumas. I question whether he owed 
his inspiration to any particular source, al- 

131 



WILLIAM Harrison aims worth 

though all these writers may have affected his 
temperament. He perhaps unconsciously di- 
vined the needs of the reading public, of which 
his editorial experience may have taught him 
much. The inane fashionable novel had become 
tiresome. Moreover, it was a time, in the 
early thirties, when the nation of England 
was absorbed in the growth of her material 
prosperitj-, and when a country^ is engrossed 
in commerce and manufactures, in the pro- 
duction of wealth, tales of adventure seem 
necessary to stimulate flagging imagination. 
We have seen the evidence of it in our own 
land during the past ten years, when casting 
aside the metaphysical, the psychological, the 
long drawn-out analyses of character, the 
public eagerly devoured story after story of 
fights, and wars, and daring deeds — whose 
lucky authors bore off rewards of fabulous 
amount and grew rich upon the royalties 
earned by their hundreds of thousands of 
copies. 

Begun in 1831, Ainsworth*s *'Rookwood" 
was published in 1834. It has been generally 
considered by critics to be a powerful but un- 
even story, but it leaped at once into popu- 
larity, carrying with it the youthful author. 
The *• Romany Chant" and "Dick Turpin's 
Ride to York "were the chief features; but the 

132 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

Ride was the thing, like the chariot race in 
Ben-Hur. It was actually dashed off in the 
glow of enthusiasm, the white heat of imagi- 
nation. It was, says George Augustus Sala, 
"a piece of word painting rarely if ever 
surpassed in the prose of the Victorian Era,"* 
and he said this sixty years after the novel 
appeared. Ains\srorth has told us the circum- 
stances. "I wrote it" he said "in twenty- 
four hours of continuous work. I had pre- 
viously arranged the meeting at Kilbum 
Wells, and the death of Tom King — a work 
of some little time — but from the moment I 
got Turpin on the high road, I wrote on and 
on till I landed him at York. I performed 
this literary feat, as you are pleased to call 
it, without the sHghtest sense of effort. I 
began in the morning, wrote all day, and as 
night wore on, my subject had completely 
mastered me, and I had no power to leave 
Turpin on the high road. I was swept away 
by the Curious excitement and novelty of the 
situation; and being personally a good horse- 
man, passionately fond of horses, and pos- 
sessed moreover of accurate knowledge of a 
great part of the country, I was thoroughly 
at home with my work, and galloped on with 
my pet highwayman merrily enough. I must, 
•Sala's Life and Adventures (1896) p. 83. 

133 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

however, confess that when my work was 
in proof, I went over the ground between Lon- 
don and York to verify the distances and 
locaHties, and was not a Httle surprised at 
my accuracy." This tour de force — the com- 
position of a hundred novel-pages in so short 
a time, was performed at * ' The Elms, ' ' a house 
at Kilburn where he was then living. It brings 
to mind the familiar story of Beckford, writ- 
ing Vatbek in French, in a single sitting of 
three days and two nights, which is more or 
less apochryphal. 

It is a proof of the merit and of the success 
of this chapter that, like many other success- 
ful literary efforts, it was ** claimed" by some 
one else. Mr. Bates refers rather indignant- 
ly to an assertion of R. Shelton Mackenzie, 
made upon the authority of Dr. Kenealy, and 
contained in the fifth volume of an American 
edition of the Nodes Ambrosianae^ that Doc- 
tor William Maginn, of convivial fame, wrote 
the "Ride" as well as all the slang songs in 
"Rookwood." But Maginn was seldom 
sober and doubtless he bragged in his cups. 
Kenealy believed in Arthur Orton, the Tich- 
bome "claimant," and was capable of beHev- 
ing in any claimant, particularly if he was an 
Irishman ; while Mackenzie was not celebrated 
for acumen or accuracy. Sala says of the 

134 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

absurd tale : " As to the truth or falsehood of 
this allegation I am wholly incompetent to 
pronounce ; but looking at Ainsworth's strik- 
ing and powerful pictures of the Plague and 
the Fire in his 'Old St. Paul's,' and the nu- 
merous studies of Tudor life in his * Tower of 
London,' I should say that 'Turpin's Ride to 
York ' was a performance altogether within 
the compass of his capacity." 

In the light of later years, it is interesting 
to observe the comparisons made between 
Bulwer and Ains worth . In Fraser^ s Magazine 
for June, 1834, there is a review of ** Rook- 
wood " in which the author is praised far be- 
yond the writer of Eugene Aram and Paul 
Clifford. Bulwer, according to Sala, was fated 
"to be beaten on his own ground by another 
writer of fiction very much his inferior in 
genius; but who was nevertheless endowed 
with a considerable amount of melodramatic 
power, and who had acqtiired a conspicuous 
facihty for dramatic description." It may be 
that the defeat drove Bulwer to those other 
fields in which he won the reputation which 
has preserved his name while that of his con- 
queror of seventy years ago has faded almost 
into oblivion. 

Ainsworth was now a conspicuous man, and 
his celebrity as an author, combined with his 

135 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

personal attractions, made him a welcome 
guest at many houses, notably at Gore 
House, where Lady Blessington so long held 
sway — "jolly old girl," he calls her in one of 
my letters, written in 1836. The beauty was 
as fascinating as ever at forty-seven. " Every- 
body goes to Lady Blessington' s," said Hay- 
don in his Diary. The effervescent Sala tells 
of meeting Ainsworth there. "I think" he 
says **that on the evening in question there 
were present, among others, Daniel Maclise, 
the painter, and Ainsworth, the novelist. 
The author of 'Jack Sheppard' was then a 
young man of about thirty, very handsome, 
but somewhat of the curled and oiled and 
glossy whiskered D'Orsay type." TheD'Orsay 
type was by no means distasteful to my lady. 
Sala relates at second-hand the anecdote 
about Lady Blessington 's placing herself be- 
tween D'Orsay and Ainsworth, and saying 
that she had for supporters the two hand- 
somest men in London. 

In 1837 **Crichton" was published, the hero 
being James Crichton, the ** Admirable," about 
whose name has grow^n so much that is fabu- 
lous, but who was nevertheless a real person. 
The book was fairly successful, and while it 
did not add materially to Ainsworth 's fame, 
it did not diminish it. It was well done, and 

136 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

the author, as usual, spared no pains and 
was careful in his researches. In his introduc- 
tory essay and in the appendices, which Sid- 
ney Lee pronounces "very interesting,'* he re- 
printed, with translations in verse, Crichton's 
Elegy on Borromeo and the eulogy on Vis- 
conti. Madden intimates that D'Orsay occa- 
sionally figured as the model of the accom- 
plished hero. The author received £350 for 
the book — more than for "Rookwood." He 
had become a figure in the literary'- world, 
and his name was something with which to 
conjure. He was a favorite contributor 
to Fraser^s Magazine ^ and his portrait ap- 
pears among "The Fraserians," indeed a 
goodly company. 

IV. 

In January, 1837, Richard Bentley com- 
menced the publication of Bentley' s Miscel- 
lany, under the editorship of Charles Dickens. 
There is a familiar story that the name origi- 
nally proposed was "The Wit's Miscellany," 
and that when the change was mentioned in 
the presence of "Ingoldsby" Barham (not 
Douglas Jerrold, as often supposed), he re- 
marked "Why go to the other extreme ? " In 
January, 1839, Dickens turned over the ofiice 
of editor to Ainsworth with " a familiar epistle 

137 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

from a parent to his child,"* which, in view 
of the fact that Ainsworth was seven years 
his senior, was quite condescending. Oliver 
Twist had just been the feature of the Mis- 
cellany, and now Ainsworth made his second 
and most celebrated venture in what Sala 
calls * * felonious fiction ' * — the immortal * * Jack 
Sheppard." 

There are some conflicting statements about 
dates. Madden says, in one place, '*In 1841 
he [Ainsworth] became the editor of ' Bent- 
ley's Miscellany,' " and on the next page, ** In 
the spring of 1839 he replaced Dickens in the 
editorship of 'Bentley's Miscellany,' and con- 
tinued as editor till 1841. "f He also says 
that in 1839 the novel, to be called ** Thames 
Darrell," was advertised to appear periodi- 
cally in the Miscellany , then edited by Charles 
Dickens, t Robert Harrison in the Dictionary 
of National Biography (title Bentley) says 
that Dickens retired from the post of editor in 
January, 1839. Mr. Axon tells us in the Dic- 
tionary that Ainsworth became the editor in 
March, 1840. Forster puts the date 1839, 
which seems to be correct, and the discrep- 
ancies are no doubt susceptible of explanation. 

* Forster's Dickens, i. 141. 

t Life of Lady Blessington, iii. 226, 227. 

t Life of Lady Blessington, iii, 224. 

138 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

The success of "Rook wood" and of Oliver 
Twist led to the new essay in the series which 
the sanctimonious Allibone says might be 
very appropriately published under the title 
of the "Tyburn Plutarch" — not a very sane 
or witty remark in my opinion. Ains worth 
cast over the scamp Jack Sheppard the man- 
tle of romance, and made him "a dashing 
young blood of illicitly noble descent, who 
dressed sumptuously and lived luxuriously" 
— whose escapes from New^gate and other 
adventures were described with a charm and 
vigor which took the public captive. The 
sale exceeded even that of Oliver Twist, and 
no fewer than eight versions were produced 
upon the London stage. Mr. Keeley achieved 
great notoriety as the hero, and Paul Bedford 
first made his mark in the character of Blue- 
skin. 

It was not until these dramatic productions 
appeared that the sedate and fastidious began 
the outcry against the so-called criminal 
school of romance — an outcry perpetuated in 
Chambers' Encyclopaedia and in Allib one's 
Dictionary. The author and the novel were 
bitterly attacked. The main ground of denun- 
ciation seems to have been the belief that the 
lower orders might be aroused to emulate 
the brilliant robber, all of which is sheer 

139 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINS WORTH 

nonsense. I am tempted to quote at length from 
a letter of Miss Mitford, the personification 
of an old maid, because it contains an epitome 
of the adverse criticism as well as a little bio- 
graphical note which I have not encountered 
elsewhere. 

" I have been reading 'JackSheppard, ' " she 
writes to Miss Barrett,* **and have been 
struck by the great danger in these times, of 
representing authorities so constantly and 
fearfully in the wrong ; so tyrranous, so dev- 
ilish, as the author has been pleased to 
portray it in 'Jack Sheppard,' for he does 
not seem so much a man or even an incarnate 
fiend, as a representation of power — govern- 
ment or law, call it as you may — the ruling 
power. Of course, Mr. Ainsworth had 
no such design, but such is the effect ; and as 
the millions who see it represented at the 
minor theatres will not distinguish between 
now and a hundred years back, all the Char- 
tists in the land are less dangerous than this 
nightmare of a book, and I, Radical as I am, 
lament any additional temptations to out- 
break, with all its train of horrors. Seri- 
ously, what things these are — the Jack Shep- 
pards, and Squeers's, and Oliver Twists, and 

•January 3, 1840 : Letters, Am. Edition, 1870, ii. 
p. 218. 

140 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

Michael Armstrongs — all the worse for the 
power which, except the last, the others con- 
tain ! Grievously the worse ! My friend Mr. 
Hughes speaks well of Mr. Ainsworth. His 
father was a collector of these old robber 
stories, and used to repeat the local ballads 
upon Turpin etc. to his son as he sat upon his 
knee ; and this has perhaps been at the bot- 
tom of the matter. A good antiquarian I be- 
lieve him to be, but what a use to make of the 
picturesque old knowledge! Well, one com- 
fort is that it will wear itself out ; and then 
it will be cast aside like an old fashion." 

The latter part of the prophecy has come 
very near to fulfillment but we have no proof 
that the awful novel caused any marked in- 
crease of crime. The real utility and value of 
stories like "Jack Sheppard" may well be 
questioned, for they surely do not belong to 
the highest and best in literature, but that 
any one became a thief or a burglar because 
of them IS yet to be demonstrated. 

In 1840 Ainsworth and George Cruik- 
shank brought out the "Tower of London," 
in monthly numbers and were equal partners 
in the enterprise. It has always been regarded 
as a work of merit. In 1841 the author re- 
ceived £1,000 from the Sunday Times for 
"Old St. Paul's," and it was later one of 

141 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

Cniikshank's grievances that he was not asso- 
ciated in this production, the idea of which he 
insisted was his own. Among my letters is one 
written by Cruikshank to Ainsworth on the 
subject, which has not, as far as I know, been 
pubHshed, and I give it because it reveals the 
relations of the two men quite distinctly. 

" Amwell St., March 4, 1841. 
My Dear Ainsworth :— 

Mr. Pettigrew called here yesterday and 
stated your proposition. Had that propos- 
al been made any time between last December 
up to about a fortnight back I should have 
been happy, most happy, to have accepted 
the offer — but now I am sorry to say, but 
I cannot — no, I have so far committed myself 
with various parties that if I were to with- 
draw my projected publication I am sure that 
I should be a laughing stock to some and what 
is worse — I fear that with others I should 
lose all title to honor or integrity. I do assure 
you, my dear Ainsworth, I sincerely regret — 
that I cannot join you in this work, but 
what was I to think — what conclusion was 
I to come to but that you had cut me. At 
the latter end of last year you announced that 
we were preparing a "new work!" in the 
early part of December last. I saw by an 
advertisement that your ** new work" w^as to 
be published in the * * Sunday Times . * * You do 

142 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

not come to me or send for me nor send me 
any explanations. I meet you at Dickens's on 
*'New Year's Eve." You tell me then that 
you will see me in a few days and explain 
everything to my satisfaction. I hear noth- 
ing from you. In your various notes about the 
" Guy Fawkes " you do not even advert to the 
subject. I purposely keep myself disengaged 
refusing many advantageous offers of work 
— still I hear nothing from you. At lenth 
{sic) you announce a New Work as a com- 
panion to the ** To Tver" ! without my name. 
I then conclude that you do not intend to join 
me in any "New Work" and therefore de- 
termine to do something for myself — indeed 
I could hold out no longer — to show that 
others besides myself considered that you had 
left me, I was applied to by Chapman & Hall 
to join with them and Mr. Dickens in a spec- 
ulation which indeed I promised to do should 
the one with Mr. Felt be abandoned. How- 
ever I have still to hope that when you are 
disengaged from Mr. Bentley that some ar- 
rangements may be made which may tend to 
our material benefit. 
I remain, my dear Ainsworth, yours 
very truly. 

Geo. Cruikshank." 

In 1841, Ainsworth published the **Guy 
Fawkes" mentioned in Cruikshank's letter. 
About this time he seems to have become in- 
volved in disagreements with Bentley. On 
June 22, 1841, he wrote to Oilier: 

143 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

" I am scarcely surprised to learn from you 
that Mr. Bentley states that I promised Mr. 
Barham to write two separate stories for the 
November and December numbers of the Mis- 
cellany, because it is only one of those mis- 
statements to which that gentleman, in all 
the negotiations I have had with him, has in- 
variably had recourse. Nothing of the sort 
was either expressed or implied, and I cannot 
believe Mr. Barham made any such state- 
ment, because it is entirely foreign to the spirit 
of the whole arrangement. I ^11 thank you 
however to give Mr. Bentley distinctly to un- 
derstand that I will not write any such story 
or stories, and that if he does not think fit 
to enter into the proposed arrangement, I 
shall adhere to the original agreement and 
finish Guy Fawkes in February next. I beg 
you will also give him to understand that I 
will not allow Mr. Leech or any other artist 
than Mr. Cruikshank to illustrate any por- 
tion of the work; and that I insist upon a 
clause to that effect being inserted in the mem. 
of agreement." 

The remark about Cruikshank is significant 
when read in connection wth the artist's 
letter of three months before, and with his 
subsequent conduct. For although it is clear 
that the trouble about the publication of '*St. 

144 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

Paul's" had been healed, through the efforts 
of Mr. Pettigrew, he rehashed the old griev- 
ance thirty years later. 

A rupture with Bentley was imminent, and 
it came very soon. Ainsworth left the Mis- 
cellany and in February, 1842, the first number 
of " Ainsworth's Magazine " made its appear- 
ance. It wras continued until 1853 when it 
was absorbed in the "New Monthly Maga- 
zine," acquired from Colbum, of which serial 
Ainsworth had been for a short time in 1836, 
an editor. At first he Tvas both editor and 
proprietor, but later he sold the magazine to 
his publishers — another grievance of Cruik- 
shank. For it he wrote " The Miser's Daugh- 
ter," a work of considerable power, which 
was long years afterward dramatized by An- 
drew Halliday and produced at the Adelphi 
Theatre. In 1843 followed * ' Windsor Castle, ' ' 
an historical romance with the scene laid in 
the reign of Henry YIII.; and in 1844 his act- 
ive pen busied itself with another story of 
the same class, **St. James's, or the Court of 
Queen Anne." 

During the period between 1836 and 1844, 
Ainsworth, as we have seen, was closely asso- 
ciated with Cruikshank, who was destined to 
become a thorn in his side. The second issue of 
** Rookwood " was illustrated by Cruikshank, 

145 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

who furnished also the designs for "Jack 
Sheppard," **The Tower of London," "Guy 
Fawkes," "The Miser's Daughter," "Wind- 
sor Castle" (in part), and "St. James's." 

Whatever may be said of Cruikshank as an 
artist, he was beyond question a vain, self- 
centred and disagreeable person. "He had a 
tendency," says Blanchard Jerrold, "to quar- 
rel with all persons with whom he had business 
relations, and when he did quarrel, his words 
knew no bounds."* He came to that stage 
of boundless conceit when he regarded him- 
self as the creator of all the works for which 
he suppHed the illustrations and reduced the 
writer to the level of an ordinary amanuensis. 

All the world knows his absurd pretensions 
to the origination of Oliver Twist. He also 
asserted his claim to everything that was 
good in "Jack Sheppard," "The Miser's 
Daughter," and "The Tower of London." 
But he also claimed Egan's Life in London 
and even a poem of Laman Blanchard 's 
which he had illustrated for the Omnibus — 
as well as the pattern of the hat worn by Rus- 
sian soldiers ! Blanchard Jerrold says in the 
Life that the controversies about Dickens and 
Ainsworth "arose from Cruikshank's habit 
of exaggeration in all things," which is a 

•Life of Cruikshank (1882), i, 48-49. 

146 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

biographer's euphemism, signifying in plain 
English that the man was an unmitigated 
liar. 

If any one is curious about the history of 
the controversies, he will find a full, fair and 
dispassionate account in Chapters YIII and 
IX of Jerrold's book. The biographer prints 
in full Ainsworth's dignified rejoinder to 
Cruikshank's assault, and justly ridicules 
the utterances of the eccentric designer. Austin 
Dobson, a competent and impartial judge, has 
recently added his condemnation of Cruik- 
shank's arrogance.* ''He was not exempt" 
says Mr. Dobson ''from a certain 'Roman 
infirmity ' of exaggerating the importance of 
his own performances — an infirmity which 
did not decrease with years. Whatever the 
amount of assistance he gave to Dickens and 
to Ainsworth, it is clear that it was not 
rated by them at the value he placed upon it. 
That he did make suggestions, relevant or 
irrelevant, can hardly be doubted, for it was 
part of his inventive and ever projecting 
habit of mind. It must also be conceded that 
he most signally seconded the text by his 
graphic interpretations ; but that this aid or 
these suggestions were of such a nature as to 
transfer the credit of the ' Miser's Daughter ' 

•Dictionary of National Biography, Cruiksbank. 

147 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

and * Oliver Twist ' from the authors to him- 
self is more than can reasonably be allowed." 

Mr. Firth, a friend of Cruikshank, says in 
his Autobiography:* "Cruikshank labored 
under a strange delusion regarding the works 
of Dickens and Ainsworth. I heard him an- 
nounce to a large company assembled at 
dinner at Glasgow that he was the writer 
of * Oliver Twist.' * * He also wrote the 
* Tower of London,' erroneously credited to 
Ainsworth, as well as other works commonly 
understood to have been written by that 
author. My intimacy with Cruikshank en- 
ables me to declare that I do not beheve he 
would be guilty of the least deviation from 
truth, and to this day I can see no way of 
accounting for what was a most absurd delu- 
sion." In fact, there is only one way, if we 
concede truthfulness to the deluded person; 
he was not of sound mind. 

That Cruikshank was pertinaciously sug- 
gestive may be readily admitted. **Hewas 
excessively troublesome and obtrusive in his 
suggestions " says Ainsworth. " Mr. Dickens 
declared to me that he could not stand it and 
should send him printed matter in future." 
He adds, in a kindly spirit which must appeal 
to every reader, considering the grossness of 

•Vol. 1,211. 

148 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

the unjustifiable attack upon him, **It would 
be unjust, however, to deny that there was 
not wonderful cleverness and quickness about 
Cruikshank, and I am indebted to him for 
many valuable hints and suggestions." Ains- 
worth's appreciation is further shown by an 
unpublished letter in my possession, written 
on December 23, 1838, to Mr. Jones. 

"Bentley" he says ''will forward you the 
introductory chapters and illustrations of 
Jack Sheppard with this note. As it is of the 
utmost consequence to me to produce a fav- 
ourable impression upon the public by this 
work, I venture to hope that you will lend me 
a helping hand at starting. * * Cruikshank's 
illustrations are, in my opinion, astonishingly 
fine. The scene in loft throws into shade all 
his former efi'ortsinthis line." This letter also 
reveals what appears abundantly in the pages 
of my collection, — that Ainsworth was given 
to calling on all his friends of joumaHstic and 
magazine associations to praise his books. 
He was not at all backward in urging them to 
pufi" the new works; and when Mr. Ebers was 
the manager of the opera, he artfully threw 
in suggestions of ''free tickets," which was 
perhaps justifiable but scarcely consistent 
with dignity. 

As an example of the way in which Cruik- 

149 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

shank took pains to inflict upon his author 
the details of his designs, it may not be amiss 
to quote a letter which is also among my 
possessions, and which has not been pub- 
lished, to the best of my knowledge. It is 
addressed to Ainsworth and is dated ** Satur- 
day evening, 5 o'clock." 

"Jonathan Wild has hold of Jack's left arm 
with bis left hand, and grasps the collar with 
his right. The Jew has both his arms round 
Jack's right arm and Quilt Arnold has hold 
of the right side of Jack's coat. This fellow 
in making his spring at Sheppard may upsett 
the gravedigger who nearly falls into the 
grave. I should advise the approach of the 
attacking party to be thus. The Jew and 
some other fellow go round the north of the 
church and lurk there and Qt. Arnold in that 
road at the N. W. corner — Wild himself to 
come along the south side so as to take Jack 
in the rear. Darrell is about to draw his 
sword. In the other subject I have given 
Jonathan a stout walking stick. I have only 
time to add that I am yours very truly. The 
cheque all safe, many thanks." 

Cruikshank first put forth his claim publicly 
in 1872, by means of a pamphlet called The 
Artist and the Author^ just after the publica- 
tion of the first volume of Forster's Dickens, 

150 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

It is likely that he was encouraged in his folly 
by the flattery of foolish friends. Jerroldlays 
much blame on Thackeray, from whom he 
quotes a long passage exalting the artist far 
beyond the author. ''With regard to the 
modem romance of 'Jack Sheppard,'" re- 
marks Thackeray, "it seems to us that Mr. 
Cruikshank really created the tales, and that 
Mr. Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to 
it. Let any reader of the novel think over it 
for awhile, now that it is some months since 
he has perused and laid it down, — let him 
think, and tell us what he remembers of the 
tale. George Cruikshank's pictures — always 
George Cruikshank's pictures." Mr. Jerrold 
expresses the opinion that Thackeray was 
always unjust to Ainsworth. ' * He caricatured 
him unmercifully in Punch, and never lost an 
opportunity of being amusing at his expense. ' ' 
I am not inclined to agree with Mr. Jerrold 's 
views. The long and cordial intimacy of the 
two men is evidence against the truth of the 
theory. I find no record of any feeling of 
resentment on Ainsworth's part against the 
author of Vanity Fair, and Ainsworth was 
by no means timid in self-defence or averse to 
a sturdy combat with those who assailed 
him. Thackeray — who never got over the 
conviction that he himself was an " artist " — 

151 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

a picture maker — naturally gave to the illus- 
trator an undue meed of praise ; and at the 
risk of denunciation by all the scribblers who 
succumb to the ** disease of admiration," and 
find it easy to glorify a famous man as if he 
were perfect and infallible, I venture to say 
that in grotesqueness and faulty drawing, the 
great Snob and the great Cruikshank were 
not very dissimilar. Yet Thackeray's com- 
ments were wisdom itself when compared 
with the silly utterance of a Mr. Walter Thorn- 
bury, who thus delivers himself: **Even 
Dickens had his fine gold jewelled by Cruik- 
shank. Ainsworth's tawdry rubbish — now 
all but forgotten, and soon to sink deep in the 
mudpool of oblivion, — was illuminated with 
a false splendor by the great humorist."* A 
critical person might be disposed to inquire 
why the "great humorist" should lower him- 
self by illuminating anything with a ** false 
splendor." It is not complimentary to the 
great humorist, but Mr. Thornbury uncon- 
sciously told the truth; his hero was falseness 
personified. 

In his *'Few Words about George Cruik- 
shank," Ains worth said: **For myself, I 
desire to state emphatically that not a single 
line — not a word — in any of my novels was 

• British Artists from Hogarth to Turner, ii, 59. 

152 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

written by their illustrator, Cruikshank. In 
no instance did he even see a proof. The sub- 
jects were arranged w^ith him early in the 
month, and about the fifteenth he used to 
send me tracings of the plates. That was 
all." He adds: ''Ne sutor ultra crepidam. 
Had Cruikshank been capable of constructing 
a story, ^w\ry did he not exercise his talent 
when he had no connection with Mr. Dickens 
or myself? But I never heard of such a tale 
being published." Of course, it may be said 
that Cruikshank did not pretend that he had 
written the books — only that he had furnished 
the leading ideas ; that is an easy thing to as- 
sert, a hard thing to disprove, and an impos- 
sible thing to demonstrate. 

It is fairly manifest that if there had been 
any real foundation for the claims of Cruik- 
shank, he would not have waited for thirty 
years before setting up his title. He sought to 
account for the delay by asseverating that 
he had frequently in private asserted his 
claim, which anybody possessed of ordinary 
intelligence will see in a moment was a puerile 
make-shift; no sufficient reason or explana- 
tion. As nobody whose opinion is worth 
accepting has ever given credence to the tale 
of the old artist, it may be a waste of time to 
give it further attention; but it may be 

153 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

permitted to show that Cruikshank needed a 
good deal of instruction himself. 

The fact is shown by the letter of Dickens, 
produced in facsimile by Forster,* and it is 
confirmed by several of Ainsworth's letters 
now lying before me. In March, 1836, while 
Cruikshank was engaged on the designs for 
the second edition of **Rookwood," Ains- 
worth wrote to Macrone, the publisher, "I 
have seen some of George Cruikshank's de- 
signs, and it was because I thought them so 
sketchy that I write to you. They are any- 
thing but fiill subjects and appear to be 
chosen as much as possible for light work. He 
shirked the inauguration scene, for instance, 
because it was too crowded. I quite agree 
with you that a few good designs are better 
than many meagre sketches, and all I want is 
that you should make George understand this. 
He has evidently two styles — and one can 
scarcely recognize in some of his ' Bozzes ' the 
hand of the designer of the Comic Almanack. 

* * Do, I pray of you, see George Cruik- 
shank, and don't let him put us off so badly." 
Again, in writing to Macrone in 1836, he 
makes several recommendations for designs, 
and adds: *' Another suggestion — and this 
refers to George. In addition to the figures I 

•Vol. ii, 321-322. 

154 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

suggested, I wish him to introduce as entering 
my old gentleman's chamber, Thomas Hill, 
Esq. (in propria persona), or as I shall call 
him, Tom Vale. If George has not seen 
him, you can get the sketch from Frazer's 
Mag. but introduced he must be, as I mean to 
carry him throughout and to make him play 
the part of Mr. Weller in my story ; I wish 
George therefore to give the portrait, easily 
done, as exact as possible." In a later letter 
to Cruikshank himself, while they were at 
work together on "The Tower," he writes: 
"Pray, ^when you are at the Tower, sketch 
the gateway of the Bloody Tower from the 
south; the chamber where the princes \srere 
murdered ; the basement chamber at the right 
of the gateway of the Bloody Tower, near the 
Round Tower." All this furnishes competent 
testimony that Cruikshank was a mere illus- 
trator, directed and controlled by the author. 

VI. 

From the time of "Jack Sheppard" until 
1881, a period of over forty years, Ainsworth 
Tvas a busy man, producing book after book 
at regular intervals and closely occupied with 
editorial labors. After "St. James's" he 
began " Auriol," which was by no means suc- 
cessful. It dealt with a London alchemist of 

155 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

the sixteenth century, but the plot was defect- 
ive and it was not pubHshed in book form 
until near the close of the author's life. In 
1848 he wrote ** Lancashire Witches" for 
the Sunday Times y receiving £1,000. It was 
dedicated to his old friend James Crossley, 
President of the Chetham Society, which pub- 
lished many volumes, including Potts's Dis- 
covery of Witches and the Journals of Nicolas 
Assheton, both of which furnished much of the 
material for the story. In 1854, "Star 
Chamber" and ''The Flitch of Bacon, or the 
Custom of Dunmow " appeared. The *' Flitch" 
treated of the ancient Essex custom of giving 
a "Gamon of Bacon" to a married pair "who 
had taken an oath, pursuant to the ancient 
'Custom of Confession,' if ever — 

" — You either married man or wife 

By household brawles or contentious strife, 

Or otherwise, in bed or at board, 

Did offend each other in deed or word, 

Or, since the Parish clerk said Amen, 

You wish't yourselves unmarried agen, 

Or in a twelve months time and a day, 

Repented not in thought, any way ; 

But continued true and just in desire 

As when you joyn'd hands in the holy quire." 

In 1851 "the lord of the manor declined 
to give the flitch, but the claimants obtained 
one from a public subscription, and a con- 

166 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

course of some three thousand people assem- 
bled in East on Park in their honour."* In 
1855 Ainsworth himself offered to give the 
flitch. The candidates were Mr. James 
Barlow and his wife, of Chipping Ongar, and 
the Chevalier de Chatelain and his wife, the 
last named being well known in literary 
circles. They were old friends of Ainsworth. 
I have thirteen letters from Ainsworth to the 
Chevalier and his wife, of the most intimate 
character, dating from 1845 to 1880. In one 
of them, written at Brighton on October 22, 
1854, he says : 

**My dear Chevalier: Thanks for your 
charming little volume, fiiU of graceful trans- 
lations. You have done me the favor I find 
to include the * Custom of Dunmow ' in your 
collection. Within the last few days I have 
received another version in French of the 
same ballad by Jacques Desrosiers. The Tale 
has been translated under the title of * Un 
An et un Jour\ and published at Bruxelles. 
You will be glad to hear that a worthy per- 
sonage has announced his intention of be- 
queathing a sum sufficient for the perpetual 
maintenance of the good old custom." 

On January 5, 1855, he writes to Madame 
de Chatelain : 

•Diet. Nat. Biog., i, 198. 

157 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

" I need scarcely say, I hope, that I shall be 
most happy to entertain your claim for the 
Flitch — and though I believe a prior claim has 
been made, I will gladly give a second prize 
rather than you should experience any disap- 
pointment." On July 19, 1855, she received 
the flitch of bacon in the Windmill Field, 
Dunmore. 

In 1856 "Spendthrift" appeared, and in 
1857 "Merwyn Clitheroe" which he began 
in 1851 but abandoned after a fev^ wreekly 
numbers. In 1860 he published "Ovingdean 
Grange, a Tale of the South Downs." The 
two books last mentioned were partly auto- 
biographical. 

It is unnecessary to do more than to 
enumerate his later productions, for although 
they showed the scrupulous care which he 
exercised in respect to details and the pains 
he took to be accurate in historical references, 
they were never as popular as his earlier 
works. The list is quite imposing : ** Consta- 
ble of the Tower," 1861; "The Lord Mayor 
of London," 1862; "Cardinal Pole," 1863; 
"John Law, the Projector," 1864; "The 
Spanish Match, or Charles Stuart in Madrid," 
1865; "Myddleton Pomfret," [1865 ; "The 
Constable de Bourbon," 1866; "Old Court," 
1867; "The South Sea Bubble," 1868; 

158 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

''Hilary St. Ives," 1869; "Talbot Harland," 
1870; "Tower Hill," 1871; "Boscobel," 
1872; "The Manchester Rebels, or the Fatal 
*45," 1873; "Merry England," 1874; "The 
Goldsmith's Wife," 1874; "Preston Fight, or 
the Insurrection of 1715," 1875; "Chetwynd 
Calverley," 1876; "The Leaguer of Lathom, 
a Tale of the Civil War in Lancashire," 1876 ; 
"The Fall of Somerset," 1877; "Beatrice 
Tyldesley," 1878; "Beau Nash," 1880; 
" Auriol and other tales," 1880 ; and " Stanley 
Brereton," 1881. Not a single one of this 
long catalogue is now remembered. Percy 
Fitzgerald in an article in Belgravia (Novem- 
ber, 1881), said that the description of 
Ainsworth's books in the Catalogue of the 
British Museum filled no fewer than forty 
pages. Mr. Axon reduces the number of pages 
to twenty-three, but that is very extensive. 
In addition to the prose works whose titles 
are given above, he published in 1855 "Bal- 
lads, Romantic, Fantastical and Humorous," 
which was illustrated by Sir John Gilbert and 
which contains some spirited and picturesque 
verses. 

In 1881 Ainsworth was nearly seventy- 
seven, and approaching the end of his career. 
On September 15 in that year, the Mayor of 
Manchester, Sir Thomas Baker, gave a ban- 

159 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

quet in his honor at the town hall. In propos- 
ing the health of the guest, the Mayor said 
that in the Manchester public free libraries 
there were two hundred and fifty volumes 
of his works. "During the last twelve 
months," said the mayor, '* these volumes 
have been read seven thousand six hundred 
and sixty times, mostly by the artisan class 
of readers. And this means that twenty vol- 
umes of his works are being perused in Man- 
chester by readers of the free libraries every 
day all the year through." 

My English friend, the prospective biogra- 
pher of Ainsworth, takes issue with me on 
my assertion that his favorite is an author 
who has fallen into oblivion and whose books 
are not read by the present generation. He 
refers of course to English readers, and as- 
sures me that the stories are still popular in 
England. "Routledge" he says, ''issues a 
vast number of cheap editions of his works, 
and in addition many other publishing firms 
have recently issued editions of the better 
known novels. This has been done by 
Methuen, Newnes, Gibbings, Mudie, Treheme, 
and Grant Richards, to mention a few that 
I recollect at the minute." It is doubtless true 
that there is a demand for the tales among 
the less cultivated English readers, but it can- 

160 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

not, I think, be maintained successfully that 
the author has a permanent and enduring 
literary fame. Perhaps I am influenced in my 
opinion by the American lack of acquaint- 
ance ^th Ains worth and his w^orks. 

Contemporaneous memoirs and records are 
full of testimony to the personal popularity 
of Ainsworth in the social life of the day. He 
entertained freely, and was a favorite guest. 
Dickens and Thackeray were both fond of him, 
although Blanchard Jerrold, as we have seen, 
doubted Thackeray's friendship. Forster says 
in his DickenSy referring to the period circa 
1838, *' A friend now especially welcome, too, 
was the novelist, Mr. Ainsworth, who shared 
with us incessantly for the three following 
years in the companionship which began at 
his house ; with whom we visited, during t^wo 
of these years, friends of arts and letters in 
his native Manchester, from among whom 
Dickens brought away his Brothers Cheery ble, 
and to whose sympathy in tastes and pur- 
suits, accomplishments in literature, open- 
hearted, generous ways, and cordial hospital- 
ity, many of the pleasures of later years are 
due." I have a little note of his, addressed 
to Dickens, saying: "Don't forget your 
engagement to dine with me on Tuesday next. 
I shall send a refresher to Forster, the 

161 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

unpunctual." There is also this letter from 
Dickens — strangely enough, in black ink and 
not the blue which he employed in later days. 

"Devonshire Terrace, 
Fifth February, 1841. 

My Dear Ainsworth — 

Will you tell me where that Punch is to be 
bought, what one is to ask for, and what the 
cost is. It has made me very uneasy in my 
mind. 

Mind — I deny the beer. It is very excellent ; 
but that it surpasses that meeker, and gentler, 
and brighter ale of mine (oh how bright it is!) 
I never will admit. My gauntlet lies upon 
the earth. 

Yours, in defiance, 

Charles Dickens." 

One of my Thackeray letters is addressed to 
Ainsworth, dated in 1844, inviting him to 
dine at the Garrick, with the characteristic 
remark, "I want to ask 3 or 4 of the 
litteiy profession." Tom Moore in his 
Journal (November 21, 1838) mentions a 
dinner at Bentley's where the company was 
"all the very baut ton of the literature of 
the day," including himself (named first), 
Jerdan, Ainsworth, Lever, Dickens, Campbell, 

162 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

and Luttrell. We read in Mackay^s ** Break- 
fasts with Rogers" of a breakfast where he 
met Sydney Smith, Daniel O'Connell, Sir 
Augustus D'Este and Ainsworth. These ref- 
erences might be multipHed indefinitely. Ac- 
cording to Hazlitt, Ainsworth had one rule, 
as a host, which in these days of studied 
unpunctuality might be considered unduly 
vigorous; when he had friends to dinner he 
locked his outside gate at the stroke of the 
clock, and no late comer was admitted. 

It is not to be denied that he had his foibles 
and that he also had his quarrels — few men 
of any force or strength of will and character 
can escape quarrels. That he fell out with 
Cruikshank andBentleyis not to be wondered 
at, for almost everybody did that, sooner or 
later. His passage at arms with Francis 
Mahony— the Father Prout of "Bells of 
Shandon" fame— is more to be regretted, but 
he was in no way to blame. He behaved very 
well under trying conditions. The trouble 
dated from Ainsworth' s secession from 
Bentleys Miscellany — what Mr. Bates calls 
his "dis-Bentleyfication," and, ignoring their 
past intimacy and cordial companionship, 
Mahony sneered at the man "who left the 
tale of Crichton half told, and had taken up 
with *Blueskin,' *Jack Sheppard,' * Flitches 

163 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

of Bacon,' and 'Lancashire Witches/ and 
thought such things were 'Hterature,' " — fol- 
lowing it up with some rather poor and 
clumsy verse-libels, flat, stale and unprofitable 
— utterly unworthy of a moment's time. 
Ainsworth replied most courteously in a par- 
ody of Prout, called *'The Magpie of Mar- 
wood; an humble Ballade," which none could 
condemn as either coarse or brutal. When 
Mahony came back at his former friend with 
quotations from private letters asking eulo- 
gistic notices and literary aid, and when he 
said **Has he forgotten that he was fed at 
the table of Lady Blessington ? not merely for 
the sake of companionship ? for a duller dog 
never sat at a convivial board," he showed 
himself a despicable cad, a perfidious creature, 
well deserving the name of ''Jesuit scribe," 
which was about all the retort which 
Ainsworth thought fit to make. 

The kindly and forgiving nature of 
Ainsworth is shown by a letter in my col- 
lection, written on February 24, 1880, to 
Charles Kent. He says : 

" I always regret the misunderstanding that 
occurred between myself and Mahony, but any 
offence that was given him on my part was 
unintentional, and I cannot help thinking he 
was incited to the attack he made upon me 

164 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

by Bentley. Be this as it may, I have 
long ceased to think about it, and now 
only dwell upon the agreeable parts of his 
character. He was an admirable scholar, a 
wit, a charming poet, and generally — not 
always — a very genial companion." These 
pleasant remarks about the man who had 
grossly insulted him, are quite characteristic 
and demonstrate the sweet reasonableness 
with which he treated men like Cruikshank 
and Father Prout. 

As Blanchard Jerrold sajSy Puncbwas often 
quite severe on Ains^worth. Spielmann in his 
History of Punch confirms the statement : 

** Harrison Ainsworth, as much for his good- 
looks and his literary vanity, as for his ten- 
dency to reprint his romances in such journals 
as came under his editorship, was the object 
of constant banter. An epigram put the case 
very neatly : 

* '* Says Ains worth to Colburn, 

* A plan in my pate is, 
To give my romance as 

A supplement, gratis.' 
Says Colburn to Ainsworth, 

* ' Twill do very nicely. 
For that will be charging 

It's value precisely.' 

"Harrison Ainsworth could not have his 

165 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

portrait painted, nor write a novel of crime 
and sensation, without being regarded as a 
convenient peg for pleasantry." 

There seems to have been, unluckily, a 
shadow of a difference with William Jerdan, 
of the Literary Gazette^ whose diffuse and 
often tedious Autobiography was published 
in 1853. ''Among incipient authors," says 
Jerdan, "whom (to use a common phrase) it 
was in my power to 'take by the hand* 
and pull up the steep, few had heartier help 
than Mr. William Harrison Ainsworth, whose 
literary propensities were strong in youth, 
and who has since made so wide a noise in the 
world of fictitious and periodical literature. 
From some cause or another, which I cannot 
comprehend, he has given a notice to my pub- 
lishers, to forbid the use of any of his corres- 
pondence in these Memoirs, though on looking 
over a number of his letters I can discover 
nothing discreditable to him, or aught of 
which he has reason to be ashamed." I think 
it is not difiicult to understand what Jerdan 
seemed unable to comprehend. Ainsworth 
did not care to have his confidential requests 
for good notices to go out to the public. It 
was a weakness of his to beg for compliment- 
ary reviews and Father Prout had made the 
most of it; small wonder that he dreaded 

166 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

a repetition of the experience. Jerdan 
gives, however, a very kindly estimate of 
Ainsworth.* 

The good looks of Ainsworth have been 
referred to several times ; they were the good 
looks of the days of William lY., but the 
Maclise and Pickersgill portraits as well as 
the later Fry photograph have a dandified 
appearance, which in our modem eyes detracts 
from true dignity. The sketch in the Maclise 
Gallery shows him at his best, in his Fraser 
days, a fine and gallant figure, without the 
hideous whiskers of the type beloved by 
Tittlebat Titmouse. '^This delicately drawn 
portrait of the novelist** comments Mr. Bates 
"just at the time that he had achieved his 
reputation— hair curled and oiled as that of 
an Assyrian bull, the gothic arch coat-collar, 
the high neckcloth, and the tightly strapped 
trowsers — exhibits as fine an exemplar as we 
could wish for, of the dandy of D'Orsay 
type and pre- Victorian epoch." How he 
looked at seventy-seven, when the Manchester 
Mayor feasted him, we can hardly imagine, 
but an aged dandy is usually quite pitiable 
and he must have afforded a melancholy spec- 
tacle, for dandyism confirmed and persistent 
does not well become old age. 

•Autobiography, iv, 390-393. 

167 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

He lived at one time at the ** Elms'* at 
Kilbum, and later at Kensal Manor House on 
the Harrow Road. Afterwards he lived at 
Brighton and at Tunbridge Wells. When he 
grew old he resided with his oldest daughter, 
Fanny, at Hurstpierpoint. He had also a 
residence at St. Mary's Road, Reigate, Surrey, 
and there he died, on Sunday, January 3d, 
1882. On January 9th, he was buried in 
Kensal Green Cemetery, with a quiet and 
simple ceremonial as he wished. His widow 
and three daughters by his first marriage 
survived him. 

Ainsworth had no power to portray charac- 
ter or to analyze motives; his genius was 
purely descriptive. He had a strong literary 
bent, and he was a man of letters in the true 
sense. He did not possess the spark which 
gives immortality, but he toiled faithfully and 
his work was w^ell done even if he did not 
reach the standard of the greatest of his 
contemporaries. 

Perhaps his merits were characterized 
justly if rather ornately in the Sun of August 
2, 1852, where a reviewer said : 

''His romances yield evidence, in a thou- 
sand particulars, that his temperament is 
exquisitely sensitive, not less of the horrible 
than of the beautiful. We have it in those 

168 



WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH 

landscapes variously coloured with the glow 
of Claude and the gloom of Salvator Rosa — 
in those lyrics grave as the songs of the Tyrol, 
or ghastly as the incantations of theBrocken ; 
but still more in those creations, peopling the 
one and chaunting the other, namely, some 
of them as the models of Ostade, and others 
wild as the wildest dreams of FuseH. Every- 
where, however, in these romances a prefer- 
ence for the grimlier moods of imagination 
renders itself apparent. The author's pur- 
pose, so to speak, gravitates towards the 
preternatural. Had he been a painter instead 
of a romancist, he could have portrayed the 
agonies of Ugolino, as Da Vinci portrayed 
the * rotello del i5co,' in lines the most haggard 
and lines the most cadaverous. As a writer 
of fiction, his place among his co temporaries 
may, w^e conceive, be very readily indicated. 
He occupies the same position in the present, 
that Radcliflfe occupied in a former genera- 
tion." 

It is to be hoped that the forthcoming 
biography will do ample justice to the mem- 
ory of this charming literary personage, and 
may revive the fading interest in him and in 
his works. 



169 



OF THE OLD FASHION 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

SPEAKING appreciatively a few nights ago 
at the Club, concerning a recent maga- 
zine article on ''Prescott, the Man," I was 
reminded by a youthful university graduate 
of only twenty-five years standing, that 
** Prescott is an old-fashioned historian.'* 

There is much that is amusing in the 
attitude of the self-sufiicient present towards 
the things of the past, and there is also an 
element of the pathetic. I am often called an 
**old fogy," an epithet whose origin and 
derivation are uncertain, but whose meaning 
is reasonably plain. Nobody who ever had 
the name applied to him was oppressed by any 
doubt about its signification. Some authori- 
ties tell us that it comes from the Swedish 
fogde — one who has charge of a garrison, 

173 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

but I question it despite the confident 
assertion of the Century Dictionary. It is 
not altogether inappropriate, because old 
fogies are compelled to hold the fort against 
all manner of abominations. They are the 
brakes on the electric cars of modem pseudo- 
progress. Thackeray speaks of " old Liver- 
more, old Soy, old Chutney the East India 
director, old Cutler the surgeon, — that society 
of old fogies, in fine, who gave each other 
dinners sound and round and dine for the mere 
purpose of guttling." So the term is always 
associated with the stupid and the ridiculous, 
used with regard to "elderly persons who 
have no sympathy with the amusements and 
pursuits of the young.*' Nobody ever refers 
to a young fogy, although most of us know 
many exceedingly dull-witted young people 
who have no sympathy with the amusements 
and pursuits of the aged or even of the middle- 
aged. One class is no more worthy of 
contempt than the other. The adolescents 
who find their highest form of entertainment 
in "bridge" are at least as deserving of pity 
as the semi-centenarian who prefers to pass 
his evenings among his books and his pictures 
or to devote them to Shakespeare and the 
musical glasses. There are some delights 
about the library fireside which compare 

174 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

favorably with those of the corridors of our 
most popular hostelry. 

Certain kindly critics have insisted that my 
own literary tastes were acquired in the year 
1850. I am not sure that the despised tastes 
formed in those commonplace, mid-century 
days are to be esteemed more highly than the 
tastes of our own self-satisfied times, but a 
good deal may be said in their favor. Per- 
haps the past is not always inferior to the 
present. There are varying opinions on the 
subject, from the familiar saying of Alfonso 
of Aragon, quoted by Melchior, immortalized 
by Bacon, and paraphrased by Goldsmith — 
that saying about old wood, old wine, old 
friends, and old authors -—to the dogmatic 
declaration of Whittier that "still the new 
transcends the old." It may occur to anti- 
quated minds that there are some elements of 
excellence about old plays compared with the 
dramatic works of this careless, insouciant 
time; that Wordsworth has some merits 
which are superior to those of the worthy 
gentleman who now fills the ofiice of Laureate, 
and that possibly the poetry of the last few 
years is not entitled to boast itself greatly 
beside that of the early nineteenth century— 
the poetry of Scott, of Byron, of Shelley and 
of Keats. But we have the telephone and the 

175 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

trolley-car, the automobile and the operation 
for appendicitis ; and we admire our progress, 
the wonderful growth of the material, the 
mechanical, and the millionairy, while a few 
may pause to ask whether good taste and 
good manners have grown as greatly. Some 
of our older buildings for example are 
assuredly far better to look at than the lofty 
structures of steel which tower in lower New 
York and make of our streets darksome 
canons where the light of day scarcely pene- 
trates and where the winds of winter roar 
wildly about our devoted heads as we strug- 
gle, hat-clutching, to our office doorways. 
May we not cite the City Hall and the Assay 
Office as honorable specimens of dignified 
architecture? There was something impres- 
sive too about the old "Tombs," — replaced 
not long ago by a monstrosity — a structure 
which a lady recently told me was once 
referred to by an Enghsh friend who had 
never been in New York, as ** the Westminster 
Abbey of America." 

It is delightful to be young and to indulge 
in the illusions of youth — a truism which it 
is safe to utter, for nobody will dispute it. 
** Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old 
age a regret" said the strange, semi-oriental 
personage, an enigma in politics and a prob- 

176 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

lem in literature, Benjamin Disraeli. Every- 
body knows the rude saying of old George 
Chapman, which it is almost an impertinence 
to quote, but every one does not remember 
whence it came — that young men think the 
old men are fools but old men know young 
men are fools. It is certain that we have 
revolved that idea in our minds for many 
centuries. Pope, in his epigrammatic way, 
remarked that "in youth and beauty v^isdom 
is but rare," but we cannot give him credit 
for originality in the utterance. We will go 
on with our regrets, our reproofs and our 
hesitancies, and in the course of time those 
who sneer at us now as cumbersome relics, 
laudatores tempoiis acti, mere maunderers 
enamored of an effete past, will take their 
turn, fill our places, and endure the pitying 
and condescending smiles of the succeeding 
generation. There is nothing new under the 
sun and the man of to-day may as well pause 
in his arrogant career to remember that he 
will quickly pass into the category of the 
obsolete. 

Some of us who are beginning to descend 
that downward slope of life which soon 
becomes sadly precipitous, but who retain a 
vivid recollection of the long-ago, are fond of 
recalling a period of New York which in this 

177 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

era of lavish expenditures, indiscriminating 
profuseness, and careless prodigality seems 
strangely simple. Those were the days when 
in sedate Second Avenue and Stuyvesant 
Square, were the homes of dignified wealth, 
whose owners rather looked down upon Fifth 
Avenue as parvenu ; and Forty-second Street 
was almost an outpost of civilization. We 
revelled in the delights of the ancient Phil- 
harmonic concerts and believed that Carl 
Bergmann was the last evolution of a con- 
ductor ; later we recognized Theodore Thomas 
as the man who did more to develop a taste 
for good orchestral music in this country than 
any other one man who ever lived. We 
thronged the stalls of old Wallack's, with its 
most excellent of stock-companies — some- 
thing which has wholly disappeared — and we 
rejoiced in Dion Boucicault aud Agnes 
Robertson. A little later we haunted the 
upper gallery of the Academy of Music in 
Fourteenth Street— at least / did, because of 
a confirmed stringency in the money market, 
— and cheered the magical top-notes of the 
ponderous but melodious Wachtel and the 
generous tones of that most inspiring of 
singers, the splendid Parepa-Rosa. We hailed 
with loud acclaims the manly and dignified 
Santley ,— more in his element in oratorio than 

178 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

in Opera — and the royal contralto, Adelaide 
Phillips, long since forgotten except by the 
Old Guard who afterwards transferred their 
allegiance to Annie Louise Gary. It may 
have been a provincial time, but we did not 
think so ; it was a good time and we enjoyed it. 

It seems but yesterday when all over the 
land flashed the news of Lincoln's death, and 
the black draperies suddenly shrouded the 
streets while the triumphant note of Easter 
Sunday died away in a cry of lamentation. I 
was in old St. Bartholomew's in Lafayette 
Place that Sunday, and the recollection of it 
will never be lost. Nor shall I forget the 
grief and alarm of a small band of Southern- 
ers, secessionists of the strongest type, domi- 
ciled in the same house with me, as they 
lamented that in the death of Abraham 
Lincoln, the South had been deprived of its 
best friend, the man who would have made 
reconstruction a blessing instead of an 
affliction. They had been rebels, it is true, 
but they were conscious of the loftiness of 
the soul of that noble citizen who, with faults 
which are often the accompaniments of great- 
ness, stood for all that was just and mag- 
nanimous in our national life. 

Some of us have a clear recollection of the 
camping of soldiers in City Hall Park, the 

179 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

cheering of the multitude as the regiments of 
volunteers swung down Broadway on their 
march to Virginia, when we were striving to 
preserve the Republic and the horror of civil 
war was present with us every hour. We 
were less cynical, less ambitious, less strenu- 
ous in those days, and I think we were more 
serene and sincere. We had serious imperfec- 
tions, but we did not carry ourselves quite as 
mightily, and on the whole we had some 
creditable characteristics. There is no good 
reason why we should be ashamed of our- 
selves. 

Were we so very stupid in the fifties ? Was 
there not some true and honorable life in our 
social and literary world of that generation ? 
Surely our newspapers were as worthy of 
respect as some of our contemporary journals 
with their blazing capitals, their columns of 
crime, their pages of the sensational, and their 
provoking condensed head-lines which exas- 
perate me by their airy flippancy. I some- 
times wonder that nobody except myself 
utters a protest against those dreadful head- 
lines. They reduce almost everything to vul- 
garity, and the afiectation of condensation is 
distinctly irritating. Most objectionable of 
all are the headings followed by interrogation 
points, because they are misleading. If, for 

180 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

example, they say in capitals "Mr. Smith 
strikes his mother?" the average reader — 
and there are more of that sort than of any 
other — glancing over the pages misses the 
queiy and goes to his grave vt^ith the firm 
conviction that poor Smith was the most 
unmanly of brutes. I am not sure that the 
interrogation mark protects the proprietors 
against a libel suit. 

It is true that in the fifties our art may 
have been of the tame and tidy sort, timo- 
rously clinging to the conventional; our 
financial enterprises were conducted on so 
small a scale that a million was a sum which 
made the banker's heart palpitate with appre- 
hensive emotion ; our politics were concerned 
chiefly with the colored man and his relations 
to the State ; in architecture our awful brown 
stone fronts were oppressing in a domineering 
way all the town in and above Fourteenth 
Street. But there was a certain dignity about 
it all, an absence of tawdriness, a savor of 
respectability. 

Fourteenth Street ! It must be difiicult for 
the New Yorkers of to-day who have not 
passed the half-century mark to realize that 
only forty-five years ago it was really ** up- 
town." It is easier to imagine the present 
Thomas Street as it was in 1815, a spot to be 

181 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

reached only after a bucolic journey through 
country lanes which my grandfather used to 
traverse on his way to the New York Hospi- 
tal where he studied medicine. We think of 
that condition of things in about the same 
state of mind as that in which we contem- 
plate the Roman Forum or the stony avenues 
of Pompeii. It amuses me to recall the period 
of the fifties and early sixties when the Hudson 
River Railroad had its terminus in Thirtieth 
Street near Tenth Avenue, but sent its cars, 
horse-drawn, to Chambers Street and College 
Place just opposite old Ridley's, whose pic- 
tures on those familiar inverted cones of 
never-to-be-forgotten candies — the virtues 
whereof have been proclaimed sonorously on 
railway trains from time immemorial — and 
that Chambers Street station will always 
live in the memory of old-fashioned people 
who used to **go to town" from rural neigh- 
borhoods. My aforesaid grandfather took 
me often, much to my joy, to visit his son in 
West Nineteenth Street, and the conservative 
old gentleman, who served as a surgeon under 
Commodore Charles Stewart on the good 
ship ** Franklin," always went to Chambers 
Street and thence by the Sixth Avenue horse- 
railway to Nineteenth Street, which caused 
the pilgrimage to be undul^^ protracted, but 

182 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

we always reached our destination sooner or 
later— generally later. I remember that an 
idiotic notion possessed me that we were con- 
fined to traveling on West Broadway because 
country people were not allowed to encumber 
the real, the glorious Broadway, of whose 
omnibus-crowded splendors I caught but 
furtive glimpses by peering up the cross- 
streets. Another gentleman of the old school, 
whom I loved sincerely, invariably proceeded 
from Thirtieth Street — and after the genesis 
of the Grand Central Station, from Forty- 
second Street — to the Astor House, from 
which venerable house of cheer he wended his 
way serenely to Union Square, or to Madison 
Square, or to any quarter where his business 
or his pleasure led him, however remote it 
might be from City Hall Park. To him the 
Astor House was practically the hub of the 
metropolis. These details may seem to be 
trivial, but they are characteristic of the old- 
fashioned men of half a century ago who 
still clung to the swallow-tailed coat as a 
garment to be worn by daylight. It never 
occurred to them to **take a cab," possibly 
because there was no cab which a decent per- 
son would willingly occupy unless it had been 
ordered in advance from a livery stable. There 
are many reasons why this land of freedom — 

183 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

modified freedom — is preferable to any other 
land ; but when we come to cabs, we must, in 
all fairness, admit the superiority of the Lon- 
dom hansom over a New York "growler." 

The old-fashioned magazines — how few 
ever turn their pages now, and yet how much 
in them is of interest, even to a casual reader. 
Far be it from me to whisper the slightest 
word of disparagement about our gorgeous 
and innumerable ** monthlies," with their 
pomp and pride of illustration, extending 
from text to the copious advertisements, — 
those soul-stirring and lucrative adjuncts to 
a magazine of the present. Do not tell me 
that the man who buys the thick, paper- 
covered book does not read the advertise- 
ments ; he pretends that he does not, but he 
does. According to my experience he follows 
them from soap to steam-yachts, from refrig- 
erators to railway routes, but he would 
rather die than confess it. Much as I admire 
these products of our later civilization, I 
nevertheless maintain that there is more 
charm in an ancient number of any worthy 
periodical than is to be found in the latest 
issue. Time seems to add a mellow flavor 
to the good things of the past. There is 
not much to say in praise of the solemn 
Whig Review or of O'Sullivan's portentous 

184 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

Democratic Review^ but take from the shelf a 
shabbily bound volume of Graham^s Maga- 
zine of Literature and Arty published in the 
forties, and there will be discovered a wilder- 
ness of delights. The fashion-plates alone 
are dreams of comical beauty, and the steel 
plates of **The Shepherd's Love," **The 
Proffered Kiss," and *'Lace Pattern with 
Embossed View" far surpass — in a sense — 
the boasted work of Pyle and of Abbey. 
What soul will decline to be thrilled at the 
lovely skit entitled **Born to Love Pigs and 
Chickens" by that butterfly of literature, 
Nathaniel Parker Willis, which you will find 
in the number of February, 1843. Consider 
the portrait of Charles Fenno Hoffman, with 
his exquisite coatlet, his wonderful legs attired 
in what appear to be tights, and his mild but 
intellectual countenance beaming upon us as 
he sits, bare-headed, upon a convenient stage 
rock, holding in one hand an object v^hich 
may be a pie, a boxing-glove or a hat, accord- 
ing to the imagination of the beholder. Con- 
template the list of contributors, including 
Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, and 
"Edgar A. Poe, Esq.,"the "Esq." adding a de- 
licious dignity to each of the illustrious names. 
It was only "sixty years since," but can any 
magazine of to-day rival that catalogue? 

185 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

Almost every one knows that Poe was editor 
of Graham for a year and that The Mur- 
ders in the Rue Morgue as well as Longfellow's 
Spanish Student first appeared in that 
magazine. Coming to a later day, recall the 
Harper of the fifties. No pleasure of the 
present can equal that which we felt when 
we revelled in Abbott's Napoleon which turned 
us lads into enthusiastic admirers of the great 
Emperor; or when we enjoyed the jovial 
Porte Crayon whose drawing was consist- 
ently as bad as Thackeray's, but whose fasci- 
nating humor had a quality pecuHarly its 
own. Not long ago Mr. Janvier, to the 
gratification of the surviving members of the 
brotherhood of early Harper readers, gave to 
Str other the tribute of his judicious praise. It 
was in those days that we used to sing 

I want to be an angel, and with the angels stand ; 
A crown upon my forehead and a Harper in my hand. 

One may not gossip lightly about the 
Atlantic f but the Knickerbocker is distinctly 
old-fashioned. Longfellow's Psalm of Life 
first saw the light in its pages; immortal, 
even if Barrett Wendell does truthfully say 
that it is full not only of outworn metaphor 
but of superficial literary allusion. Old New 
York, adds Professor Wendell, expressed itself 

186 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

in our first school of renascent writing, which 
withered away wdth the Knickerbocker 
Magazine, But there was a Knickerbocker 
school, and the brothers Willis and Gaylord 
Clark helped to sustain its glories. The 
maga2dne began in 1832, faded in 1857 and 
died in 1864? ; but out of it sprang many of 
the authors whose names are inseparably 
associated with a golden period of our 
literature. 

It was only a few months ago that one of 
the men of those by-gone times departed this 
life, and the scanty mention of him in the 
public press compelled a sad recognition of 
the familiar truth that in order to retain 
popular attraction one must pose perpetually 
under the lime-light. Parke Godwin, who 
belonged to the order of scholarly, high-minded 
Americans, had outlived his fame, except 
among the Centurions of West Forty-third 
Street and a few old people of the same class. 
Perhaps he did not concentrate his powers 
sufficiently. Editor, writer of political essays, 
author of Vala^ a Mythological Tale^ biog- 
rapher of his father-in-law, William Cullen 
Bryant, and by virtue of his History of 
France f historian, — but he published only one 
volume more than forty years ago and then 
abandoned the task — he had that broad 

187 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

culture which sometimes disperses itself and 
fails to win for its possessor the highest place 
in the literary hierarchy. He was a delightful 
example of what we now regard as the old- 
fashioned and his address on the fiftieth anni- 
versary of the founding of the Century Club 
is a mine of good things for one who is inter- 
ested in the past of New York. **I have 
stood once more" said he "beside the easel of 
Cole as he poured his ideal visions of the 
Voyage of Life and the Course of Empire in 
gorgeous colors upon the canvas. I have seen 
the bo^^ish Kensett trying to infuse his own 
refinement and sweetness into the wild woods 
of the wold. I have watched the stately 
Gifford as he brought the City of the Sea out 
of its waters, in a style that Cavaletto and 
Ziem would envy and with a brilliancy of 
color that outshone even its native Italian 
skies. I have stood beside the burly Leutze 
as he portrayed our Washington among the 
ice of the Delaware, or depicted the multitu- 
dinous tramp of immigrants making their 
western way through the wilderness to the 
shores of the Oregon, that * hears no sound 
save its own dashings.' All have come back 
for a moment, but they are gone, oh whither? 
Into the silent land, says Von Salis ; yet how 
silent it is! We speak to them but they 

188 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

answer us not again." He brought back to 
us the beginning of things, when he told us of 
the incipient conditions of the Academy of 
Design. ''They took a room — was it sug- 
gestive? — in the old Alms House in the Park, 
and they worked under a wick dipped in 
whale-oil which gave out more smoke than 
light." He spoke of Halleck, of Gulian 
Verplanck, of Bryant, of Charles Fenno 
Hoffman, of Robert C. Sands, and of old 
Tristam Burges, "who had swallowed 
Lempriere's Classical Dictionary;" and he 
closed with a brief flight of eloquence such as 
in these days of new-fashioned chilliness it is 
seldom vouchsafed to us to hear. 

Of the same order, the friend of Halleck and 
of Duyckinck, of Andrew Jackson and of 
Martin Van Buren, who knew Samuel Rogers 
and visited him in London, was William Allen 
Butler. He was nine years the junior of 
Godwin. He might have won the highest 
eminence in the world of books if he had not 
made the lav^ his chief occupation and litera- 
ture only his recreation. The bar does not 
among its rewards number that of enduring 
fame, unless occasionally some great political 
or criminal trial perpetuates the name of the 
advocate chiefly concerned in it. Of course, 
Mr. Butler's early essay inverse, "Nothing to 

189 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

Wear," will never be entirely forgotten. A 
humorous skit as it was, its enduring merit 
is shown by the fact that in spite of the old- 
fashioned terms descriptive of woman's dress 
and of the fashionable life of nearly fifty years 
ago, in its general tone it is curiously contem- 
poraneous. Scarcely less witty and amusing 
were his poems, ** General Average " and " The 
Sexton and the Thermometer," the former 
being more highly esteemed by many than its 
popular predecessor. I suppose that he left it 
out of the later collection of his poems 
because, with his gentle and kindly nature, he 
feared that a few of its passages might give 
offense to some of his friends of the Jewish 
faith whom he esteemed and respected. His 
translations of Uhland are marked by grace- 
ful and poetic fervor, and his prose style was 
lucidity itself. His humor, always attractive 
and appropriate, lightened even his most 
serious work, from an address on Statutory 
Law to an argument in the Supreme Court in 
Washington City. It was well said of him by 
a jurist now living, that "no man of his time, 
either in England or America, held an equally 
high rank, both as a lawyer and a literary 
man." 

Another of the old-fashioned literary men, 
who was however considerably the senior of 

190 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

both Godwin and Butler, was George Perkins 
Morris, who died in 1864. He was at once a 
General of militia, an editor, a favorite song- 
writer, and the composer of an opera libretto. 
His title to immortality rests mainly upon 
the sentimental verses known as "Woodman, 
Spare that Tree," which had a flavor about 
them very dear to our grandparents. To look 
at his manly countenance in the portrait en- 
graved by Hollyer (who at the present writ- 
ing is still extant and vigorous) after the 
Elliott painting, we can scarcely imagine him 
as the author of such lines as "Near the Lake 
Where Drooped the Willow," "We Were Boys 
Together," "Land-Ho," "Long Time Ago" 
and "Whip-poor-will." But James Grant 
Wilson says that for above a score of years 
he could, any day, exchange one of his songs 
unread for a fifty dollar cheque, when some of 
the literati of New York (possibly Poe) could 
not sell anything for the one-fifth part of that 
sum. In the presence of Morris, I confess I 
cannot quite give myself up to adoring admi- 
ration of the taste of our predecessors. This 
stanza indicates his ordinary quaHty : 

The star of love now shines above, 

Cool zephyrs crisp the sea ; 
Among the leaves, the wind-harp weaves 

Its serenade for thee. 

191 



ON THE OLD FASHION 

Notwithstanding this rather trifling vein, 
admirably satirized by Orpheus C. Kerr, and 
a certain tone of commonplace, Morris had a 
genuine lyrical quality in his verse although 
it was devoid of startling bursts of inspira- 
tion, and EngUsh Hterature affords many ex- 
amples of less deserving poesy. Morris was 
an industrious editor, appreciative of others, 
and he had a personal charm which endeared 
him to those w^ho had the good fortune to 
come within the pale of his friendship, and 
particularly to those w^ho were permitted to 
enjoy the generous hospitality of his sweet 
and dignified home at UndercliS" opposite 
West Point. Smile as we may at his little 
conceits and his obvious rh^'-mes, we must 
recognize the sincere and genial nature of the 
kindly General, so long conspicuous in the 
social and literary life of old New York. 

These men, it may be said, do not prove the 
permanent value of the literature of the fifties. 
Godwin and Morris were editors and Butler a 
busy lawyer, none of them able to give their 
undivided attention to authorship. I sup- 
pose that Irving and Emerson, Bryant, Long- 
fellow, Hawthorne and Bayard Taylor were 
more distinctly the ornaments of the time, 
and there are other names which more judi- 
cious and discriminating men could substitute 

192 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

for some of those enumerated. Bayard 
Taylor's greatest work was done in later 
years, but he had already won his first fame 
— not a giant, but a poet with " the spontan- 
eity of a bom singer," as Stedman says. 
Irving, the most charming and amiable of 
w^riters, had not the most forcefiil intellect, 
but he Tvras calm and graceful, with a gentle 
and bewitching humor and a strong apprecia- 
tion of the beautiftd — a good man, beloved 
and honored at home and abroad. His fame 
is paler now than it w^as forty years gone by, 
but he has the immortality of a classic. 
Emerson had a powerful influence over the 
minds of men, but viewed in the perspective 
of time, he does not loom so largely now. I 
am not competent to venture far into the 
territory of criticism, having only the equip- 
ment of a general reader, who timidly ex- 
presses his personal feelings and leaves to 
trained and experienced judges the task of 
scientific analysis ; but we general readers are 
the jury, after all. 

As time slips by there is a tendency to merge 
the decades of the past, and to the young 
people of 1904 the period of 1850-1860 is 
every bit as remote as the period of 1830- 
1840. The university undergraduate does 
not difierentiate between the alumnus of 

193 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

1870 and [him of 1855, as I know by experi- 
ence. A melancholy illustration of this well- 
known fact was afforded recently in a popular 
play, the scene of which was laid in a time 
supposed to be exceedingly far distant, and 
the programme announced it as "the early 
eighties." The representation was enlivened 
by such antiquated melodies as **01d Zip 
Coon," "Maryland, My Maryland," and 
"Old Dan Tucker," as well as "Pretty as a 
Picture," "Ye Merry Birds," and "How Fair 
Art Thou," all as appropriate to the early 
eighties as Dr. Ame's "Where the Bee Sucks" 
and "Rule "Britannia." It was almost as 
abominably anachronistic as the naive de- 
claration of a pseudo-Princetonian who as- 
serted a membership in the Class of 1879 and 
assured me that he had been, while in College, 
a devoted disciple of Doctor Eliphalet Nott. 
If I have mingled my old-fashioned decades 
unduly, it has been because of that tendency 
to merger which no Sherman Act can sup- 
press. 

Few there are who cling with affection to 
the memory of the old-fashioned. Most of 
us prefer to spin with the world down the 
ringing grooves of change, to borrow the 
shadow of a phrase which has itself become 
old-fashioned. The flaming sword of the 

194 



OF THE OLD FASHION 

Civil War severed the latest century of 
America in two unequal parts, and its fiery 
blade divided the old and the new as surely 
and as cleanly as the guillotine cleft apart the 
France of the old monarchy from the France 
of modem days. To stray back in recollection 
to the land of fifty years ago is almost like 
treading the streets of some mediaeval town. 
But for some of us there is a melancholy 
pleasure in the retrospect and a lingering 
fondness for the life which we thought so 
earnest and so vigorous then, but which now 
seems so placid and so drowsy. 



195 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD. 

THE easy methods of modern journeyings 
to lands across t^e sea have had one 
result at least which may be regarded as dis- 
tinctly beneficial to mankind; they have 
destroyed the book in which the simple- 
minded tourist was accustomed to preserve 
the record of his wise reflections and to em- 
balm his personal experiences for the enter- 
tainment and instruction of his fellow-citizens 
of the States. I knew an old gentleman, 
formerly a member of Congress and a Major 
General of militia, who wore a cla^w-hammer 
coat by daylight and who published a vol- 
ume about his travels in which he told, 
among other things equally startling, how 
he saw all that there was to be seen in 
Florence where he sojourned for the pro- 
tracted period of twenty-four hours. I once 

199 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

met a man who had read the book and he 
assured me that it deserved a place among 
the curiosities of literature. We did a good 
deal of that sort of thing in the nineteenth 
century, which seems to us now almost as 
faded and remote as the eighteenth ; yet we 
were very proud of the nineteenth century in 
its day, and we named clubs and magazines 
after it. It was a fairly good century as 
centuries go. 

When the tourist of to-day yields to the 
temptation which at some time besets every 
man, to bestov^ his confidences upon an 
indulgent world, he usually resorts to fiction, 
cunningly presuming upon our fondness for 
stories, and he may be as didactic and as 
egotistical as he pleases in a novel, where the 
hero and the heroine meet on the steamer, 
pursue each other through all the starry fir- 
mament of Baedeker, and ultimately marry 
in Grace Church surrounded by their admir- 
ing companions of the voyage. If the heroine 
hails from Ohio and the hero is an ornament 
of the aristocratic regions of upper Fifth 
Avenue, while the villain has his domicile in 
Chicago or in Philadelphia, the complica- 
tions arising from their encounters in Lon- 
don, Rome, Venice or St. Petersburg, with 
diversions among the countless ''Bads" of 

200 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

Germany and Austria will easily supply 
material for a romance which you will 
observe in the hands of four-fifths of the lady 
passengers who recline, languid and rug- 
enveloped, upon the uncomfortable chairs 
arranged side by side on the decks of the 
favorite Atlantic ferry-boats. These chairs, 
I insist, are unspeakably tiresome. I vsronder 
that some ingenious inventor has not devised 
a better contrivance for its purpose. 

I can comprehend why women read novels 
on ship-board, but I do not understand why 
some men persist in wearing costumes not 
only inappropriate but unbecoming. The 
subject of man's dress needs careful treat- 
ment by scientific thinkers and profound 
philosophers, for Sartor by no means ex- 
hausted it. The modern Greek in his absurd 
petticoats is scarcely less ridiculous than an 
African chief in a top-hat and a frock coat, 
but the man in top-hat and frock coat w^ho 
saunters in the afternoon on the pleasanter 
side of Piccadilly is almost the supreme pro- 
duct of modern civilization. Hence it is 
manifest that there is nothing about the hat 
of Scott or the coat of Poole per sese which is 
essential' or fundamental. The Piccadillian 
arrayed in the war-garments of the savage 
would be as amusing as his Matabele brother 

201 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

clad in the conventional evening dress of New 
York and London. These considerations are 
leading me to some conclusion, I am confi- 
dent, but I am not sure that I know exactly 
what it is, unless it be the proposition that a 
being erect upon two somewhat curvilinear 
limbs and having the outward semblance of 
a man should not wear riding-breeches on a 
steamer. On the Ceramic, destined for Liver- 
pool where the quality of the Mersey is not 
and never has been strained, I observed such 
an individual, those exiguous extremities 
ought in decency to have been shrouded in am- 
pler draperies. Why should he have thus made 
a spectacle of himself? He certainly did not 
expect to ride to hounds on the upper prom- 
enade deck where the amiable lunatics who 
toss rings and play at shuffleboard disport 
themselves shamelessly. I have even seen a 
mature person attired in a golfing-suit, 
strutting upon that deck in serene self-satis- 
faction; but he was a physician from 
Boston, and on both grounds is entitled to 
sympathetic indulgence. 

In this generation the adventures of the 
ordinary American who leaves his beloved 
country to visit other climes are seldom of 
much interest to any one except himself and 
his wife. Perhaps they would be more 

202 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

charming to the reader if the writer would 
really tell the exact truth about them. No 
one ever tells the exact truth, the ^whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth, except to 
the assessor of taxes. There is a tendency 
to touch up the canvas with gaudy bits of 
color, to disguise the commonplace in a 
gaily embroidered and ornamental costume 
and to make the story live up to the illustra- 
tions. No one cares much about accounts of 
travel now-a-days unless they are abundant- 
ly adorned with pictures, and most readers 
confine their attention to the pictures which 
are often much better than the text. Yet 
there is sometimes an element of fascination 
in the commonplace and even that American 
of my acquaintance whose only thought on 
visiting Westminster Abbey — confided to his 
guide — was that "he smelt 'em," might be 
very interesting in print ; but he was incap- 
able. of composition. 

I have made it a rule of life never to tell 
any one that he ought to see that thing or 
that he ought to do anything, unless of 
course he asks my advice and accompanies 
the request with a reasonable fee. Therefore 
I will not say that every American ought, at 
least once in his life, to abandon the familiar 
routine of England and Scotland, France, 

203 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

Italy and Switzerland, the much frequented 
pathways of Germany and of Austria, and 
even the picturesque fjords of Norway, to 
take the pleasant water-journey across 
Sweden from Goteborg to Stockholm by way 
of Lakes Wennern, Wiken and Wettem, and 
the great Gota Canal with its innumerable 
locks and its quaint, delightful environment, 
varied by the foamy falls of Trollhatten. The 
falls are really admirable falls, and the pros- 
pectors do not have to turn on the water as 
they do in the Catskills. I merely suggest 
that while the trip is not one of intense ex- 
citement or fraught with episodes of thrilling 
interest, it is well worth the few days' time 
and the little trouble. The ''Smorgasbord " 
on the boat is alone worth a crossing of the 
North Sea. Sometime I wall endeavor to elu- 
cidate the mysteries of Smorgasbord, but not 
now. '* Baedeker says," oracularly, ** Persons 
unused to this institution are apt to find it 
disagree." The allegation is grossly ungram- 
matical and recklessly false. I say that it 
agrees ; but with a power of self-restraint to 
which I call your admiring attention, I re- 
frain from describing the delights of the Gota 
Canal. 

Sweden is the home of true politeness. As 
a lad, 1 was brought up in the belief that the 

204 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

French were the sole and exclnsiYe possessors 
of the priceless jewel of courtesy, but a few 
encounters with the Gaul upon the streets of 
Paris and in the conveyances which one is 
compelled to occupy in order to traverse ''the 
pleasant land of France," have satisfied me 
that the instructors of my boyhood were 
either sadly misinformed or inclined to take 
an unmanly advantage of my unsuspicious 
youth. The genuine article is as rare in 
France as the famous roast beef of old 
England is in the domains of Edward — and 
what there is of that has been imported from 
Chicago. In Scandinavian latitudes the gen- 
tle art of deference to one's fellows is carried 
to a delightful perfection. The manners af 
the natives are ideal, enchanting, worthy of 
preservation in a museum of antiquities. If, 
for example, a Gotenborgian is drinking at 
his little table in front of the Gota-KallarCy 
behind a small, consumptive-looking tree in 
an almost impossible tub, and another Goten- 
borgian gentleman approaches, the bowing is 
tremendous. After each one has thoroughly 
swept up the surrounding country with his 
hat, the second comer orders his drink — 
squanders as much as an ore upon it, I fancy, 
and that is equivalent to a hemi-demi-semi- 
quaver of a cent, to put it mildly; and the 

205 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

two wave their glasses at each other. There 
is a solemn pause — and both of them swal- 
low. As they are not given to extravagance, 
they wait half an hour before they command 
anything more, smoking meanwhile the cigar 
which can be procured only in Sweden and 
which traces its lineage to Havana by a line 
of descent which would make a Spanish 
hidalgo turn green with envy. The waiter, 
attentive and expectant, gazes upon them 
with anticipation tempered with sadness, but 
they do not plunge wildly ; they call for some- 
thing which costs about a shiver of a far- 
thing, something which bears a relation to 
coin which the ultimate trituration of homoe- 
opathy bears to real medicine. Thereupon 
they genuflect and otherwise contort them- 
selves, saying words which pass all under- 
standing, but which no doubt express sublime 
mutual admiration, reverence and devotion, 
before they swallow once more. In America 
it would all be summed up in the two unim- 
pressive monosyllables, ** Here's how ! " 

The city of Goteborg is said to have been 
founded in 1619; and when you become 
aware of its plumbing, you will be inclined to 
believe that town and plumbing are of equal 
antiquity. I showed the plumbing in our hotel 
to an aged American friend, and he told me, 

206 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

with tears in his eyes, that he was very old, 
and, like Mr. Clemens, was very wise, but that 
he had never seen anything like it in all his 
life. We were both overcome by emotion or 
something of like nature. The city was once 
famous for its plagues, and it may be well not 
to linger over the subject. Most of us know 
Goteborg chiefly because of its famous licens- 
ing system, under which the dispensers of 
alcohoHc beverages control everything* 
pocket five per cent on the capital, and are 
supposed to apply the profits to the relief of 
the poor. If this system could be introduced 
in New York, it is plain that a clever **boss," 
by making the capital large enough and by 
restricting judiciously the distribution of the 
surplus among the poor who vote the regular 
ticket, might develop the institution into a 
valuable instrumentality of government. I 
throw out this suggestion to our worthy 
Mayor, without any expectation of rewards 
that will be supplied by virtue. 

There is a pretty park in Goteborg called 
the Gardens of the Tradgardsforening, con- 
taining lovely plants and flowers, attractive 
to the visitor in spite of its forbidding name. 
It has a good restaurant and a melodious 
band. The people stroll about, enjoy the 
music, eat queer food, and drink strangely 

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AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

attractive fluids without any disorder, crowd- 
ing or ill mannered behavior, all of v^hich 
makes a New Yorker open his eyes in aston- 
ishment. The admission fee is one grain of 
the chicken-feed money of the country, whose 
value is almost inexpressible in our currency. 
When I reflect that in New York such a place 
of resort would probably be filled with a dis- 
orderly rabble, I am forced to believe that there 
are some advantages in living in an old coun- 
try with certain social laws and customs. I 
am not unaware that New York is a much 
larger town than Goteborg, but the same 
thing would be true in respect to any 
American city of the same size as Goteborg. 
Ore are delicious coins — really worth tv^o 
and seven-tenths mills apiece, if you are crav- 
ing accuracy, and when you figure out how 
many ore are represented by your letter of 
credit you are surprised at your afl&uence. I 
should much enjoy finding out just how many 
ore represent the wealth of Mr. Carnegie or 
of Mr. Rockefeller. I always feel extravagant 
in France and in Sweden, the amounts seem so 
colossal, and I remember the historic person 
who, when called upon by his son for **a 
thousand," wired back "francs or pounds?" 
I must, however, in candor, warn the travel- 
ler against what has been very properly 

208 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

styled by a jovial scribbler "the ghastly 
Swedish language," whose terrors, snares and 
pitfalls could be described only by Mark 
Twain. * * The city we call plainly and frankly 
Gothenburg," says the Englishman who com- 
plains, "a Swede will go out of his way to 
style Yoteborch, for he has four or even more 
ways of sounding g and borrows sounds, 
moreover, from the French and German lan- 
guages, just as if his own has not plenty of 
idiosyncracies. We cannot give our approval 
to a language which uses the Roman alpha- 
bet and attaches different sounds to it from 
all the other civilized nations of the earth." 

Greatly as I admire the sturdy folk of 
Sweden, I must enter a protest against such 
preposterous words as "Olycksfallsforsakring- 
saktiebolaget " which I found in my telephone 
book at the Continental in Stockholm, a city 
where, by the way, they have a telephone 
system as nearly perfect as any mundane 
thing can be. I am able to see in my mind's 
eye the scorn and contempt with which our 
New York despots of the wire would regard a 
service like that of Stockholm, cheap, speedy 
and efficient. There the humble commoner 
who wishes to send a message is neither in- 
sulted by the shrill, feminine operator who 
condescends to attend to his call, nor robbed 

209 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

by her indiflferent and arrogant employers. 
They would look upon it in the same way 
that Mrs. Sniff in **Mugby" regarded the 
French railway restaurant service. 

It is worthy of note that the Swedes of 
Sweden have little fondness for Americans 
and labor under the delusion that we are a 
race of uncouth and ill-mannered barbarians. 
Those of us who behave ourselves according 
to the canons of respectability are at once set 
down as "English," and the bands play 
**God Save the King" for us by way of 
special honor. I am told by a Swedish phil- 
osopher that it is due to the misconduct of 
returned immigrants who have forgotten their 
manners and who come back to the home 
country with unpleasant ways acquired in 
Wisconsin and in Minnesota, glorying in 
their emancipation and indifferent to the 
polite customs of their native land. The rude 
deeds of these persons are naturally ascribed 
to the baneful influence of the Western Repub- 
lic, and we are discredited as a people because 
of the misconduct of a few who have not 
become thoroughly assimilated with our civi- 
lization. I do not contend that as a people we 
are models of politeness ; the contrary is the 
truth. But there is, after all, something more 
substantial about us than our lack of breed- 

210 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

ing would indicate. At all events, the Scandi- 
navians appear to be willing to try their 
fortunes on the soil of America where they 
make strong, stalwart and loyal citizens. 
They have a mania for revisiting their old 
abodes and I have always thought that Mr. 
Lear was mindful of the fact when he said : 

There was a young lady of Sweden 

Who went by the slow train to Weedon, 

When she reached Weedon Station 

She made no observation, 

But thought she would go back to Sweden. 

There are many foreign delusions about us 
which rank with the ancient notion that a 
Frenchman is a little man who eats frogs. 
The London shop-keeper who told me that the 
fierce July heat was not, of course, to be 
compared with that of my country, imagined 
that I was a South American. The stolid dig- 
nitary who met me on my first visit to the 
la\Y courts responded to my inquiry about 
the pending business by saying loftily, '* Noth- 
ing on which would interest you to-dje — no 
divorce cases on to-dye.** He had evidently 
formed his opinion of American taste by pe- 
rusing the dreadful American news as reported 
in the London papers or in the Paris edition 
of the Herald f from which any one would 
naturally infer that nothing ever occurred in 

211 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

**the States" except strikes, railway acci- 
dents, lynchings, and crimes of all descriptions. 
Wherever i go, waiters pursue me with jugs 
of ice- water, for there seems to be a deep- 
seated conviction in their minds that we 
drench ourselves internally with the chilling 
beverage from early mom to dewy eve. I 
believe it was a Hamburg waiter who cried 
out in his perplexity over an incoming horde 
of English-speaking tourists — **I know not 
if they are the ees-waters or the godams." 
We encountered another odd opinion, which 
had some foundation of reason, on the coach 
from Guildford to London. I sat beside the 
gentleman who held the reins, a well-dressed 
person of the business class, driving for the 
pleasure of it, and during the journey he pro- 
pounded to me the query, "Why is it that 
American women are so much more charming 
than American men ? " He added graciously 
that he meant nothing personal by the re- 
mark, and he seemed to be much gratified 
when I told him that I did not know, unless 
it was because the same thing might be said 
of almost every nation of thew^orld. I confess 
that I made a mental reservation with respect 
to one nation whose name I will carefully 
conceal. 
We were much interested in the business 

212 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

methods of some of the cities of the continent. 
It was a cloudy day and we decided to avail 
of the opportunity to go **ad the bank," as 
Narcisse did. It was in Copenhagen and in a 
modest room on a comer we found the whirl 
and turmoil of affairs at the highest point at 
eleven in the morning. Entering modestly, 
we discovered four young clerks eating sand- 
wiches and one aged and feeble clerk drinking 
coffee, while three other old ones blinked and 
dozed, regarding with disfavor the adventur- 
ous persons who disturbed their slumbers. 
When we announced that wq wished to draw 
£20 in German currency there was a serious 
panic in that financial establishment. Con- 
sultations were held between t\^o of the most 
choice antiquities on the premises, and after 
much Danish conversation, wholly incompre- 
hensible to us, one of the patriarchs feebly 
remarked that it was a very large amount to 
call for in German money. There was a hint 
that the resources of the bank, grand as they 
were, were hardly equal to such a sudden and 
violent strain. At last a compromise was 
effected at one-half in German notes. The 
operation occupied t^wenty minutes; in New 
York it would have been all over in a minute 
and a half. These men have all the time there 
is, and they do not know what hurry means. 

213 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

Perhaps they are happier for it ; that is the 
orthodox way of looking at it; but I doubt 
if it is the true way. People who waste time 
in doing trifling things cannot have much 
time left in which to do great things. 

The Wall Street broker does not waste 
precious moments between ten and three ; but 
he does his task quickly and enjoys his leisure 
on his yacht, or upon the golf links. American 
absorption in pure work is a tradition of the 
past. 

The reader of Lowell's essay on ** A Certain 
Condescension in Foreigners " must have been 
led to reflect about a certain ignorance in 
foreigners, and when we consider ourselves in 
our relations with other peoples and other 
countries, we are forced to remember that we 
also are "foreigners," a term in which lurks 
a furtive flavor of disparagement, because it 
implies a lack of sympathetic accord with 
a particular environment. A foreign body 
commonly invites instantaneous expulsion, 
and when we have occasionally encountered 
the manifestations of the sullen, suspicious 
hostility which shows itself now and then as 
we loiter among our transatlantic fellow- 
beings, we awake to the truth that only 
patience and long-suffering, united with a 
natural desire to acquire the coin of Columbia 

214 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

converted into shillings or kroner, marks or 
francs, obtain for ns such indulgence as we 
receive. You gave me a slight pang of sor- 
row, little French boys, when on our way to 
Versailles you hailed our inoffensive coach 
with shrill cries of "^ bas les Anglais /" It 
was bad enough, infant Gauls, to decree our 
downfall so mercilessly, for it is never agree- 
able to be * ^called down* ' for any cause, but you 
added a poison to the sting of your strident 
scoffing when you sought to deprive us of our 
nationality. We thought of pausing to as- 
sure you of our American citizenship and to 
silence your clattering tongues by reminding 
you of Lafayette and perhaps describing to 
you that cheerful statue of his in Union 
Square, which always seems to be about to 
board a Broadway car. His name you would 
no doubt have associated with the Rue which 
we traverse on our way from the Gare du Nord 
to the hotel, but he would not otherwise have 
appealed to your emotions. Sous might have 
stilled your senseless clamor, but although 
willing to devote millions for defence, we re- 
fused to pay even one centime for tribute, 
loyal to the memory of the statesman who 
more than a century ago said something of 
that sort in response to the demands of the 
ancestors of our little French boys. 

215 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

I am not positive that we ourselves are 
altogether exempt from a like antagonism 
towards foreigners, except perhaps, in recent 
years, with regard to Englishmen, our newly 
discovered and long-lost brothers. There is a 
certain condescension on our part when we 
address a Frenchman, an Italian or a Span- 
iard in what William Allen Butler called the 
**you poor foreigner screech," or talk broken 
English to him after the well-known fashion 
of Mrs. Plornish. Why indeed, save for sor- 
did motives, should any of our European 
cousins be fond of us ? We are not unusually 
attractive, our ways are not their ways, we 
speak their languages with deplorable inaccu- 
racy and with a detestable intonation, our 
tastes differ from theirs with a violence which 
must shock their sensibilities, and our man- 
ners must often appear to them to be atro- 
cious. I did not feel greatly surprised when 
some individuals in Stockholm sneeringly re- 
ferred to us as " Eskimo," unaware that there 
was a Scandinavian in our party. In fair- 
ness, I must add that our expert indignantly 
denied that our critics were Swedes and de- 
nounced them as mere voyaging Germans 
who are almost always frankly discourteous 
and impolite. 

A consciousness of our own infirmities must 

216 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

restrain us from making very merry over the 
vagueness of English ideas about our geogra- 
phy and our history. The ancient story of 
the British sportsman ^who expected to find 
Buffalo in the city of that name and Indians 
in the streets of Indianapolis, who looked for 
big game in the vicinity of Boston and for 
cowboys in the suburbs of Philadelphia, has 
long since been enrolled among the myths. 
But many of our friends in England are still 
quite cloudy in their minds when they at- 
tempt to dip into our affairs. We remember 
however that few Americans are able to tell 
us the situation of the historic counties of 
England or of the famous towns whose names 
are familiar, London, Liverpool and Chester 
excepted. Fewer possess an accurate knowl- 
edge of the wonderful empire of Australia, or 
prosperous New Zealand, or Tasmania. How 
many fairly intelligent persons of New York 
or Chicago can explain precisely the points of 
difference between a Liberal and a Conserva- 
tive ? It would puzzle most of the men at the 
Club if they were asked to give a definite 
analysis of the parties in the French Republic 
or to tell what excites the angry passions of 
the members of the legislative bodies of Aus- 
tria and of Germany. We may not with any 
justice censure the foreigner if he is unable to 

217 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

perform the task of defining the terms Demo- 
crat and Republican, because any of us might 
be embarrassed if called upon suddenly to do 
the same thing. An ancient disciple of Jeffer- 
son's school would be perplexed in making 
out the meaning of a modem Democratic 
platform with its manifest tendency towards 
the centralization of power which Jefferson 
abominated, and a Jacksonian would be 
equally astonished at the advocacy of free 
silver and an elastic currency. I am not find- 
ing fault with these latter-day changes of 
creed, but I am only trying to demonstrate 
the difficulty of associating fixed principles 
with party names. 

Many years ago a friend was fortunate 
enough to sit at dinner next to Lord 
Cockbum, the distinguished Chief Justice, who 
asked him why Chief Justice Chase did not 
pay a visit to England. '* We w^ould be glad 
to do him honor," said Cockbum cordially, 
unmindful of the fact that Chase had been for 
some time among the immortal dead. No 
American lawyer of the humblest rank would 
have made a like mistake about Cockbum; 
and yet the powers of the great English dig- 
nitary were of much less importance than 
those possessed by the Chief Justice of the 
Supreme Court of the United States, a tribu- 

218 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

nal which may sweep away the most solemn 
enactments of our parliament. Cockbnm 
was a famous lawyer, with some odd failings 
about which divers stories are told more 
amusing than edifying. When we think of 
Chase's masterly administration of the 
Treasury during the Civil War, and of 
Cockbum's signal discomfiture at Geneva, 
where Bvarts and Waite easily dominated 
him, the patronizing remark about Chase is 
almost mirth-provoking ; but we do not for- 
get the masterly trial of the Tichborne case 
where Cockbum gave evidence of his learning, 
force and ability as a jurist. 

I remember too that the same friend, who 
as Governor of New York had been seriously 
interested in our prisons, asked Lord Tenter- 
den (grandson of Tenterden, the Chief Justice, ) 
to give him a letter of introduction to one of 
the authorities in charge of an English prison, 
and, received a card commending **my friend 
who has been Governor of the State Prisons of 
New York." A lawyer in New York was re- 
cently asked by a worthy firm of London 
solicitors to attend to a small matter in 
Omaha, a city -which they evidently believed 
to be about as remote as Elizabeth or 
Rahway , and they were quite unaware of the 
fact that the amount involved was scarcely 

219 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

as much as the mere expense of the journey. 
Yet, after all, these little things are as unim- 
portant as the attempt of a courier in Italy 
to convince me that Brooklyn is situated in 
Ne^w Jersey. 

As excusable are the instances of inaccuracy 
which English writers afford when they are 
dealing with our men of literature and of 
politics. I cite as an example the remark of 
the late Richard Holt Hutton in his critique 
of Hawthorne. " In the great Civil War," 
said Mr. Hutton, ''his [Hawthorne's] sym- 
pathies, as might be expected, v^ere with the 
trimming Buchanans and Douglasses of the 
hour." To associate two such bitter foes as 
Buchanan and Douglas, is bad enough, 
but to those of us who are able to re- 
member, with pride, the firm, outspoken 
loyalty with which the "Little Giant" es- 
poused the cause of the Union at the outbreak 
of the conflict, only a few weeks before his 
lamented death, the charge of "trimming" in 
that season of strain and stress seems unjus- 
tifiably cruel; and when we reflect that his 
defeat for the Presidency in 1860 was the re- 
sult of the Southern opposition to him, the 
accusation becomes all the more absurd. We 
may pardon the offender because he spoke 
without malice, from the plenitude of his mis- 

220 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

information, but we are disinclined to forgive 
a reviewer, pretending to scholarship, when 
he calls our great novelist (pace MarkJT wain) 
"Fennimore Cooper." Fancy the contemptu- 
ous wrath of the Saturday Review if one of 
us should write of Sir Walter Scot or George 
Elliott ! Such trifles do not however militate 
against the truth that in Mr. Button's review 
of our most famous romancer we find an ap- 
preciation of Hawthorne, a discriminating 
analysis of his style and of his dreamy, mys- 
tic and poetic nature which has not been ap- 
proached by any critic on our side of the sea. 
I will not pause to repel the insinuation 
that Hawthorne was a sympathizer with 
those who were untrue to their country, but 
perhaps it may be well to remind contempo- 
rary readers that there were many sincere and 
patriotic men who were appalled by the 
dreadful consequences of the great conflict ; 
who, were not convinced of the wisdom of the 
Administration; and who despaired of the 
republic. My own father, who served his 
country faithfully in Mexico and in the w^ar 
of the rebellion, brevetted for his meritorious 
conduct — as loyal a man as ever breathed, — 
was frankly of the same mind as Nathaniel 
Hawthorne and Franklin Pierce, except that 
he had more confidence than they had in the 

221 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

ultimate triumph of the North. Their lack of 
confidence however was not inspired by sym- 
pathy with secession. 

In the matter of errors about other coun- 
tries, it occurs to me that in early life I was 
subject to delusions about palaces. A famous 
verse, sung more frequently in those days than 
now, was partly responsible for them. Such 
is the infirmity of man, that I am not sure of 
the exact words, but one may take refuge in 
the recollection that even Lamb almost al- 
ways quoted his favorite old poets incorrectly, 
as Canon Ainger has pointed out with infinite 
pains. 

'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, 
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home ! 

A certain sentiment about these lines akin 
to that which is awakened by the old, oaken 
bucket or the tree which the woodman is said 
to have spared, endears them to all of us who 
belong to the generation which knew not 
automobiles or imperialism. We may wonder 
perhaps why John Howard Payne, whose 
former place of residence on Long Island was 
respectable but not palatial, should have con- 
sidered it worth recording that palaces did 
not closely resemble his home. We have not 
sojourned in palaces very intimately, but we 
have contemplated the exteriors of many and 

222 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

the interiors of a few, with feelings of limited 
awe. I am thinking not so much of the som- 
bre edifices in the Italian cities, whose lower 
stories are largely given over to uses not 
wholly unconnected with commerce, as Mr. 
Micawber might have said, but of those 
which are dignified by royal occupation. It 
is sad that the King of England should be 
obliged to live in a town-house resembling a 
brown-stone block of the style prevalent in 
Fifth Avenue a quarter of a century ago. 
Much fun has been made of us about that 
brown-stone front fashion, long since aban- 
doned, but when I bear in mind some of the 
enormities of London, the dreary monotony 
of Paris, and the unspeakable ugliness of 
modern Rome, I come back to old New York 
with my self-respect unimpaired. They can- 
not throw stones — even brown stones — at 
us with impunity, and we have learned a 
good deal quickly while they have learned 
very slowly indeed. The man who shut the 
Tiber in between solid walls, without a single 
sluice, is a fit subject for capital punishment, 
but only some special form of torture would 
meet the case of the caitiff who estab- 
lished a gas-house on the site of the Circus 
Maximus. Was there no other spot, Italian 
iconoclast, whereon a gas-house might have 

223 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

been erected ? You had a cotton-factory once 
in the CoUseum and you have filled the The- 
atre of Marcellus with dirty shops, but you 
might have relegated the manufacture of gas 
to some quarter ^where the odors would blend 
harmoniously with the malarious exhala- 
tions of the Campagna. We benighted bar- 
barians of the West could have done no worse. 
If Buckingham really built the palace which 
bears his name, I do not wonder that they 
took off his head, but they should have de- 
capitated him before he began his career as an 
architect. They tell me that he did not devise 
the stupid structure. It must have sprung 
from a brain akin to that w^hich created that 
whitey-brown packing box, the palace at 
Stockholm, which is at the moment staring 
me in the face. The appropriate home for the 
king is old St. James's, where he might view 
the guard-mount every morning, when the 
picked men of the household troops — picked 
for their beauty rather than for their bravery, 
I am told — parade in scarlet tunics and im- 
pressive shaggy hats, to the music of an ad- 
mirable band. But he seems to lead a nomad 
life and is almost as much of a wanderer as 
Wotan or an American billionaire who lives 
in so many houses that the tax-collector has 
trouble in defining his domicile. 

224 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

The Elysee Palace is by no means superior 
to the White House, even as our "Executive 
Mansion" has been amended and modified of 
late. Sans Souci, where nobody seems to 
live, has more of Voltaire about it than it 
has of the great Frederic. The summer resi- 
dence of the Kaiser appears to be inhabitable, 
although not magnificent ; but the palace in 
Berlin, where the exploring tourist prome- 
nades in snow-shoes, is of the veriest com- 
monplace. The Trianons are dainty, but in- 
ferior to the meanest of Newport's alleged 
"cottages," and Versailles must have been as 
comfortable a place of abode as the Broad- 
Exchange building or the Grand Central Sta- 
tion. On reflection, I am convinced that 
Payne was right in preferring that little Long 
Island shanty, humble as it may have been, to 
any of the palaces I have encountered and the 
doubtful pleasures to be derived from their 
occupancy. A rainy day in a country house 
might be made delightful, notwithstanding 
the phrase we hear so often, but a rainy day 
in a palace must be as dreary as a winter af- 
ternoon in aHght-house or a performance of a 
French comic opera in a BerHn theatre. 

Years ago I was amused in reading the 
gloomy forebodings of Mr. Frederic Harrison 
when he complained that "in a few years 

225 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

London will be only a grimy Chicago or a 
stufiy New York." He may call Chicago 
grimy if he will, for soft coal is just as sooty 
in America as it is in England, but it may 
well arouse ** laughter for a month" to hear 
a Londoner deride any other town as 
"stufiy." Our metropolitan city may be 
crowded, disorderly, full of mistakes in archi- 
tecture, lacking in parks and having an 
abominable sky-line ; dirty here and there, but 
surely not very dirty; yet it is not stuffy. 
Nearly twenty years have passed since Mr. 
Harrison uttered his wail over the possible 
destruction of all that is lovable in London, 
his prophecy that it w^ould soon be turned 
into a wilderness of stucco and huge American 
hotels. He had no foreshadowing of the 
coming of Mr. Yerkes, who is improving their 
railways to conform to modem standards, or 
he might have given us an additional cry of 
grief. Yet there is not very much difference 
between the London of to-day and the Lon- 
don of twenty years ago, except where the 
officials have seen fit to widen streets like the 
Strand, which sorely needed improvement. 
There are a few large hotels, but not so many 
as to ruin the city ; and the natives seem to 
enjoy them very well. London has not lost 
the historic interest of which Mr. Harrison is 

226 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

justly proud, — an interest greater to us than 
that of Paris or even of Rome, for it has been 
continuous for over a thousand years. We 
behold the Middle Temple, St. James, St. 
Paul's and the other Wren churches, the 
Tower and the Abbey, with an emotion which 
tawdry St. Denis and even Saint Chapelle or 
Notre Dame cannot awaken; and the few 
shattered relics of Rome's period of decay are 
melancholy fragments whose charm has been 
sadly sacrificed by a stupid government which 
has done its best to destroy their attractive- 
ness. I see no immediate occasion to weep 
over London, and I am glad that Mr. 
Harrison has lived to see his predictions 
falsified. 

Almost allgeneralizations are fallacious, but 
it is reasonably safe to say that the solid 
worth of peoples varies in an inverse ratio 
with the amount of real, physical noise they 
make. The visitor who has braved the streets 
of Naples must carry with him through life 
the memory of the dreadful din which rises 
even to his lofty perch in the remote quarter 
of BertoHni's. In Naples everybody howls 
systematically and persistently, and even the 
so-called dumb, driven cattle are impelled to 
emulate their human associates. In olden 
times, New York had a certain deep bass 

227 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

rumble which, as a boy, I used to listen to of 
nights, quite impressed by the sound which I 
afterwards discovered was caused by the in- 
numerable omnibuses, long since vanished 
and of which no one except myself ever spoke 
without applying to them the epithet ** lum- 
bering." Even the dismal squeaking of the 
elevated trains and the resounding clangor of 
the trolley cars have not yet made of New 
York a noisy city ; and London, while it has 
its *'bus" rumble still and some street cries, 
is more unpleasantly boisterous. The yelp- 
ing of newsboys and of certain street vendors, 
and the loud bellowings of the horses of 
Paris are not soothing, yet Paris is only a 
little noisier than New York and London. 
But for him who, like myself, delights in still- 
ness, Stockholm is a paradise of repose. The 
street cars proceed with only an occasional 
tinkle. I have seen a dozen steamboats land- 
ing at the same stretch of wharf in the little 
river which lies between the Palace and 
Blasieholm, with never a whistle or a clang 
of a bell, no one interfering with any other, 
and no more confusion than would be oc- 
casioned by the passing of two small vehicles 
on a country road ; while the crowds of pas- 
sengers stole away as silently as the cele- 
brated Arabs who folded their tents. I saw 

228 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

an expectant multitude a^wait for nearly an 
hour the raising of a May-pole at Skansen on 
the midsummer holiday. The raising -was 
accomplished slo^y and by the most ludi- 
crous and primitive methods. When at last 
the pole stood upright, I awaited the shout 
of triumph with which an American assem- 
blage would have hailed the achievement ; but 
not a sound was heard, not even a sigh of 
satisfaction. It was the victory of self- 
suppression. 

No reasonable person ever expects any one 
else to agree with him in his opinions about 
the other side of the Atlantic. If you have 
never been there, your ideas are of no value. 
If you went, but travelled about rapidly, you 
are told that you should not have tried to do 
so much in so short a time. If you proceeded 
in a leisurely way, you are assured that the 
places you visited were much inferior to 
those places which your friends saw but 
which you did not see. The sapient indi- 
vidual who calmly says **0h, you ought to 
have, etc, etc," cumbers the earth exten- 
sively. For some unknown reason, a merci- 
ful law of nature permits the existence of 
those who tell one what "he ought to have 
done," when their advice has not been 
solicited. 

229 



AN AMERICAN ABROAD 

Now, I care not what the American aristo- 
crats who occasionally honor transatlantic 
domains may say, but I do not believe that 
any man ever really liked the life of a foreign 
land or enjoyed its people or its customs, 
unless after a long experience he acquired the 
taste and became completely expatriated. 
It is not that the Hfe of his own land 
is the better, but it ought to be for him. 
America may be more delightful than Turkey, 
but I doubt if a Turk could ever enjoy Ho- 
boken as much as Constantinople. I do not 
believe that any son of New York can really 
enjoy a life in London or in Paris as much 
as his life in the great city of our own 
United States. 



230 




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